(FORTUNE Magazine) – Over the past year I had read articles declaring the CD dead, heard friends talk about friends who had stopped patronizing record stores, and watched music executives fret over the impending meltdown of their business. All thanks to MP3, an algorithm that crunches music into tiny, e-mailable files capable of near-CD-quality sound. By all accounts, Internet users everywhere were busy ripping millions of songs from CDs, converting them into MP3s, and trading them with strangers. And here I was, a technology writer with nary a megabyte of space on his hard drive devoted to MP3s. As the Judds (or at least one of them) poignantly asked in 1996, "Why Not Me?"

Not that I could snag that song online. In fact, I couldn't get any song. Whenever I tried from work, my browser just idled, then quit. But I was determined to join the revolution. My chance came one night when my girlfriend casually mentioned that she liked "Beautiful Stranger," the Madonna song on the new Austin Powers soundtrack. I told her not to bother buying the disk, that I would get her the song she wanted and would do it without ever leaving my couch. Unimpressed, she went to bed. I went to work.

Yahoo turned up 25 possible MP3 search sites. I started at MP3 Place, a kind of Yahoo of MP3 search engines. MP3 Place tried for "Stranger" on something called Acid Search and turned up 38 sites waiting for me to download the song. Easy money. I clicked on the first site. An error message popped up telling me that "Netscape's network connection was refused." Same with the next site. And the next. And the next dozen.

The most promising lead came from MediaFind, which found 62 places hosting my "Beautiful Stranger." It assured me that there was a 95% chance of the first recommended site being open. And indeed, I did pull up a site called DreamX ftp. But for download privileges, DreamX pointed me to another site where I would obtain a password by following certain instructions. Thus began a sort of Blue's Clues for the fetish set: I was to click on a series of porn ads looking for words that completed a provided sentence. The first letter of each of those words would provide a password that would open DreamX's jukebox. Sounded easy until each ad spawned a gremlins-in-water series of self-opening windows. My computer crashed three times. Finally I got the password (the clues: "Edwards, Polaroids, Daddy"--don't ask), typed in EPD, and got: nothing. The server was down. One more site, Listen.com, didn't turn up "Beautiful Stranger" but did suggest some band called Gilli Moon, which Listen.com assured me would sound just like Madonna. I went to bed.

This is the MP3 revolution? Wasted man-hours in the pursuit of a $12 saving? Billboard proclaimed that MP3 would fundamentally change the music industry. "MP3 is to the '90s what MTV was to the '80s," the writer declared. But MTV got me to wear Billy Idol-style fingerless gloves; with three months left in the '90s, MP3 had only gotten me to waste my time. Granted, part of the revolution lies in cutting out the middleman, in getting MP3s directly from the artist, but the part that I liked best--the "free" part--seemed overhyped. Without that, what was the point? A recent Jupiter Communications study found that only 13% of Internet users regularly listened to MP3 files and that 39% weren't interested in owning any kind of MP3 player. Another 46% didn't even understand what the player would do. I didn't feel so alone.

But I still wanted the song. I called a friend, a sophomore at a large Midwestern university. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a music industry trade group and chief tracker of music piracy, figures that 30% of all pirated music is traded over college computer systems, down from 60% two years ago. My friend has been doing his part to get the average back up. He happily tells me he's never had a problem downloading MP3s and that he has a friend who filled up a 13-gig hard drive--about 3,250 songs' worth--though he does concede that his constant connection to the university's Ethernet helps. He recommended Scour.net, a site in which Michael Ovitz recently bought a controlling stake.

Despite Ovitz, Scour.net didn't prove any more fruitful. Over the next few days I tried more sites, downloaded a special downloading program, and sneaked on a co-worker's computer to make sure the problem wasn't with my motherboard. I even tried calling Madonna (sadly, her publicist never called back). Finally, desperate, I tried generic search engine HotBot, which led me to a Brazilian Website ("As MP3s dos Grandes Sucessos do Cinema"), which led me to "Beautiful Stranger." And it worked! The song was mine. But still, the search had taken almost a week--time I could have spent with my girlfriend or doing real work. I felt ripped off.

The group to blame, I assumed, was the RIAA. Frank Creighton, the group's director of antipiracy, eagerly assured me I was right. The RIAA employs a Web-crawling device to automate the same hunt I embarked on. Upon finding an infringing site, the RIAA issues a cease-and-desist notice to the Internet service provider. As a result, Creighton has seen thousands of sites shut down in the past six months alone. But, he says, "there's nothing to keep [a poster] from putting it back up immediately." Now the RIAA plans to subpoena records from ISPs and punish offenders itself.

If that's bad for me, what's happening in Oregon is worse. On Aug. 20, the U.S. Attorney's office in Eugene scored the country's first conviction under 1997's No Electronic Theft Act. Now a 22-year-old student at the University of Oregon faces up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine for passing out thousands of free copies of songs, software, and movies. "We're still pursuing this area," an Assistant U.S. Attorney there assured me. If that makes snagging songs harder, I think I'll help my girlfriend add CDs to her collection the old-fashioned way. By buying them.

--Daniel Roth