Some things you’ll never get used to / some things you’d rather forget / let’s say it again

Here’s an anniver­sary some would rather forget:

.….…2008 marks the 10-year anniver­sary of two of the first MP3 play­ers, the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, and the Rio PMP300, but chances are you didn’t lis­ten to a first-gen MP3 player in 1998. With the first iPod still three years off, most of us were in the heights of our com­pact disc addic­tion 10 years ago, con­tent to hear our music on portable CD play­ers. Hell, some of us still lis­tened to cassettes.…

In early 1999 I was at a Fes­ti­val Mush­room con­fer­ence in Coffs Har­bour, North­ern NSW, with the Fes­ti­val NZ team and all the dis­cus­sion, well in between the stuff about how shock­ingly bad all the ocker bands were, was about the first gen­er­a­tion play­ers just hit­ting the market.

And about Rupert Mur­doch (he owned the com­pany and his son James ran it)  and Roger Grierson’s (he was MD) plan for an online data­base of music that one could down­load to these prim­i­tive machines.

Over a few beers, we laughed a lit­tle at the idea.…

Tagged with: music • new technology