Quantifiable Media, Thank You Napster

I will never forget Friday, March 2, 2001 while living in Cary, North Carolina when my dry cleaners told me, “You heard?  Napster is being shut down on Monday.  Download everything you can!”

And I did. 

For two days and two nights, I stayed up thinking of songs titles and artists from my teenage years, my father’s favorite music, my mother’s favorite music, and favorite movie soundtracks.  I downloaded, downloaded, and downloaded.

Until this day, everyone with an iPhone probably has dozens or hundreds of songs that originally came from Napster especially when Steve Jobs made a rare public announcement while fighting Pancreatic cancer on June 6, 2011 that you could upload them into a newly built iCloud without penalty or worse case fear of prosecution.

Napster unknowingly created the most lucrative market in entertainment history: data around the people listening to the music.

Continue reading here on icrunchdatanews.com part one of my five part "Lights, Camera, Analytics!" series.