Though nearly everyone in the music business spends a great deal of time talking about the Internet, the industry's steps toward cyberspace have thus far been tentative. One of the few major steps has been the Macintosh music festival -- this year reincarnated as the Intel New York Music Festival -- which brought the notion of a traditional multi-day music fest into the digital age by making the performances available on the Internet as they happened.

\This year, the four-day festival took a further step into the future, allowing bands that wished to play to submit music clips via cyberspace, though only about 30 of the 400 featured acts were booked in this way. It also forged stronger links with Plug-In, a two-day conference it co-sponsored, at which executives of music, Internet and music-Internet companies tried to predict what a Web-based music business might look like and, more importantly, how they would profit from it. (Rolling Stone was one sponsor of the conference).

\The festival's shows attracted a bigger audience on the Net than any previous Webcast, but if the reactions from those in the clubs was any indication, Intel -- and festival founders Andrew Rasiej and Michael Dorf -- may be a little ahead of their time. Few concert-goers clustered around the computers the chipmaker set up in each of the 20 venues, and many seemed to regard the technology as an interesting sidelight to four evening's worth of upcoming (and a few already up) acts. And though there were some promising technologies announced and previewed -- including N2K's plan make singles available online for 99 cents -- the best part of the festival was the live music, performed, mostly, the old-fashioned way.

\Jill Sobule was one of Wednesday night's highlights, pulling off a funny, touching performance at the Bottom Line that was so much stronger than her recent album, "Happy Town," many in the audience looked stunned. Though she can come off as precious on record, her easygoing takes on even too-serious songs kept the crowd riveted, and her turn behind the drum kit on a funked-up "I Kissed a Girl" proved she's more a multi-talent than a one-hit wonder. Later on at Tramps, the English band Swervedriver exuded almost no stage presence at all, but compensated for it with a strong, surreal set that mixed Beatlesque hooks with Sonic Youth-style feedback.

\Thursday night at the Knitting Factory, former Dream Syndicate frontman Steve Wynn performed a compelling hour of mostly new material that approached psychedelic rock with the proto-punk punch of British Invasion bands like the Faces. Over at the Mercury Lounge, the Belgian art-rock act dEUS was more abstract than even Swervedriver, mixing Captain Beefheart-style effect with fragmented, lo-fi melodies. Though the band's oddball lyrics about the New Jersey Turnpike were appealingly weird, the strangest moment of all came when the woman in front of me leaned back and said, "These guys are *huge* in Luxembourg."

\The Washington, DC-based Tuscadero won Friday night's congeniality award with a Tramps show that mixed catchy, energetic punk and pop culture-damaged lyrics like "You shake me in my shoes/Even in your Underoos." Despite their harder-edged approach, Girls Against Boys didn't quite sizzle at a sweltering Brownies. Though both bands used their Intel festival shows to try out new songs, neither departed significantly from their signature sounds, and Girls Against Boys' driving, double-bass take on indie-rock stayed locked in a thumping but unimaginative groove.

\Just when it was starting to look like no one remembered the Sundays, Cinnamon evoked the English group Saturday night at Brownies with an acoustic set of luminescent, sugary pop about faltering devotion. Perhaps as a comment on the crowd attending a music festival sponsored by a microchip maker, vocalist Frida Diesen introduced "Northwest Passage" by saying, "As you can see, we're not going to tell you what our songs are about. We figure you're intel-ligent enough to sort them out." At Tramps, one of alternative country's brightest hopes,