Guitarist Joe Satriani [ tickets ] is no stranger to technology--his equipment changes are front page news for guitar magazines. But for his latest album, "Engines of Creation," Satriani has wholeheartedly embraced the Internet as a promotional tool.

"Engines" opened on Billboard's Top Internet Sales chart at No. 12 in its first week of release, and his website boasts 50,000 unique hits monthly.

Don Zulaica caught up with "Satch" to talk about the Internet, his place in it, and its somewhat rocky assimilation into the music industry.

LiveDaily: What is your strategy for utilizing the Internet?

Joe Satriani: Number one, it's to get direct access to fans that you've got who would become bigger fans if they just heard more music. That's the problem with any business. If you make toothpaste and you're selling it, you go into a drugstore and say, "Can you please put this in front of the counter?" So people will know that there's blueberry ice cream-flavored toothpaste. If they don't know it's there, they'll never try it.

The problem with brick-and-mortar was always space. When you sign with a larger record company, you hope that you've solved that problem because the record company has got muscle and they can say, "I know this guy is a niche artist, but I want you to put him prominently displayed somewhere." With the Internet, everything is in the same place--distance is conquered immediately. There's billions of web pages out there.

Tell me about www.satriani.com.

We've had our website up for about six years. Kevin Burns, one of my managers at Bill Graham Management, really spearheaded it, along with the owner of ISP Networks in San Francisco. Even when I was looking at the Internet like, "This is a pain for me while I'm busy trying to make music." They kept saying, "It's going to happen. It might take a couple years. Just keep working on it."

What's the traffic like?

Last week, my Webmaster John Luini sent me this stat that we had 5.1 million hits. In a week. I mean, it was ridiculous! That's not unique hosts, that's just hits. I think we're up to 50,000 unique hosts a month. So the people visiting the site are spending an enormous amount of time, checking out every page. Meaning, hopefully we're doing something right.

What kind of special promotions do you do, for the fans?

For every show on this tour, we give 2-10 web contest winners free backstage passes. I get to meet some of the people. After reading their comments for years, all of the sudden there's a face. "Hey, you're Chrome Boy!" I really do read that stuff. I used to be able to answer it, but I can't do that anymore--hundreds of posts per day.

Obviously, the site is very community-oriented, and fans certainly appreciate that. But you are also a musician making a living from your work, so there's a business angle too, right?

Basically, if you do good music business, it then allows you to do your next record. That's all it is. If you don't do good business, they don't lend you the money to make another record. I've got a publishing agreement, a merchandising agreement, etc., that spans the globe. So I've actually never been heavy on trying to sell something on my site because I've got these other relationships. I also just thought, there's people coming to my site, I don't want them bombarded with, "Buy this!" I want them to think, "Come on in."

What's your feeling on related industry lawsuits, like Metallica [ tickets ] with Napster?

I think it's ridiculous when you have multi-millionaires going after kids. Obviously, at some point, there's going to be a problem with people getting something for free. Nothing else is for free. When you buy some milk at the grocery store, you've got to pay for it, otherwise the milk people go out of business. You can draw the parallel, but really when it comes down to it, we can speculate how much money they've [Metallica] got. And they're going after 355,000 people who just really love their music and have probably spent $300, maybe more, already on Metallica products in the last five years. And they just want that extra $10? I just don't get it. I mean, say there were a million people out there who somehow got their record for free. They're probably going to buy a ticket, a T-shirt, and more records.

How should the bands and labels deal with it? How would you handle it?

If I was the head of Sony Music, I'd find that guy who wrote the Napster program and say, "Hey, let's do some business." It goes back to Bill Gates missing the Internet. I think the record companies have missed it. From my view, it's ridiculous how often they miss it. Don't get me wrong, they do a great service, they fund me to do what I do--and for that I'm eternally grateful. But at the same time, I want to say, "I can't believe you guys missed this. I can't believe you didn't find that guy and hire him, and that you're trying to solve this problem of electronic delivery through lawsuits." That's got to be the biggest waste of time, ever. Why doesn't Lars spend his money getting in touch with the Napster guy and make him part of the fold? To me, it's like violent behavior instead of intelligent, inclusive-based behavior. Hey, I'm sure [Napster will] put me out of business completely. [laughs] But even though it might be "wrong," it's not wrong.