myTunes
In the late 90s I worked for an online music company in California called Liquid Audio - yep, surfing that dotcom bubble! The product was excellent, we'd got agreements with the manufacturers of music players - which were just appearing - to get our format supported, and if digital music actually took off, there was a good chance that we'd be leading the revolution: Liquid was a serious rival to MP3.

But we struggled to get big labels to allow us to put out their headline music acts in our format. Then the dotcom bubble burst, at the beginning of 2001, and the company got into financial trouble. Later that year, iTunes took off, and did exactly what we were doing except with the Apple name to convince the music industry to go with it.

That was the end of it for me: I had to get a proper job. I later saw Liquid Audio described as "The Betamax of Digital Music" - an excellent product that just missed the big time.

Perhaps giving the stock floatation party the title "Future Billionnaires" was a bit optimistic, in retrospect...
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Mon 5 Oct 2015, 13:21, 1 reply)

thanks for inventing DRM for Microsoft you cunt

(AEthelfrith of Bernicia, Mon 5 Oct 2015, 13:52, closed)