A recent addition to my blog rotation, Writers Block Live, is that a ex Apple employee. In a recent it was nice to hear the story of a meeting that took place during the development of iTunes with a record company president, Howie Klein, who actually understood the impact of MP3’s on the way music will be consumed.
I’m talking about taking the CD’s that I own from my collection and putting them into MP3’s and having them organized in a way that suits me and listening to them all the time and that is a wonderful pleasure. It’s the next way to listen to music.
But even more telling is the fact that no-one else high-up in the industry he tried to explain this to to understood where he was coming from. This is given more insight in a comment posted by howie:
I actually WAS in charge of a label during the original fight with Napster and I totally did not get it. I’m embarrassed to say so now, but it took me months before I figured out how helpful services like Napster were for the music business.