Way back in 1995, as all forms of popular entertainment were becoming digitized and the new World Wide Web was turning the internet into a mass medium, I co-founded Apple Music Group, where I helped pioneer the thinking that led to such efforts as iTunes and the iTunes music store (now called Apple Music). There, and over the next dozen years as a co-founder of MyPlay and then CEO of eMusic, I hoped to create new ways for artists to reach their fans. But I also watched how MP3s, music streaming, and sharing applications like Napster pushed copyright boundaries and changed the business models of how music gets distributed.
During that period, as the music industry found itself debating the tech industry over issues like piracy, artists without a platform were somewhat powerless to inform the discussion. They looked to big names like Metallica, Dr. Dre, and the Recording Industry Association of America to lead the fight. In the last 20 years, though, technology has become much more available—and artists have become far more tech-savvy.
