Fifteen years ago, some friends and I started thinking about how listening to music was going to change. That was 1999, before streaming services or even the iTunes Store, so music collections were made up of CDs and files downloaded from early peer-to-peer networks.
It was a time of tremendous promise. Music, which had long been bound by the physical discs on which it was sold (and the broadcast media which promoted it), was going to become massively accessible. It was an intoxicating thought that all the music in the world might actually be something we could see and hear in our lifetimes.