Imagine this. By the year 2000, recorded music, which had been available in digital form on Compact Disk for around 8 years, became available in a highly-compressed form known as MP3. A two-minute pop song could be condensed into as little as 1.5 megabytes of data and quickly shared on fast (college) networks. Entire record collections could fit on a hard drive.

Meanwhile, the cost of quality recording equipment was steadily dropping. The ADAT format allowed 8 tracks of digital audio to be recorded on VHS tape. Computer programs like Pro Tools were still very expensive, but along came free and open-source programs like Audacity, and others like Cakewalk, Cubase and Acid, for the rest of us. Stand-alone digital audio workstations had proliferated, and while not exactly user-friendly, they did allow multi-tracking in the digital realm, including the production of MP3 files.

The World Wide Web became commonly accessable in the 1990's with the development of web browsers such as Netscape Navigator, Explorer and Safari. Service providers like America Online were popularizing the web, encouraging people to make websites that looked like this one.

What all of this meant was that many of the barriers which had existed to those of us trying to make our music widely available to the public had fallen. Recorded music had become easy to make and distribute. But it was also nearly free to share and store it. Using the net to distribute music could not guarantee an income like the old, tightly controlled distribution systems could.

This inspired a great deal of discussion, both off line and online. I participated in Jim Griffin's Pho discussion group for years trying to arrive at some solution for the problems posed by this revolution. My idea was that listeners could be asked to fund creators directly, eliminating the middlemen. With this goal, I directed my basement studio and website into the changing winds.

pioneering