The Dirty Dozen, Digital Music (phase 1)

I ran into my old buddy Pedro Vargas last week; he's now a Director at SanDisk. Pedro and I (and many of our colleagues) are part of what I had been terming "the 10 year club". Those of us who had been pioneers in the earliest days of digital music -- only now it's been closer to 15 years. Hard to believe when I think back on all that was going on in say the 1993-1995 timeframe. I was focused on music initiatives at Apple, along with then colleague David Pakman (now CEO of eMusic). Pedro was working in the music group at Intel (yes, they had one). My good friend Ty Roberts (co-founder of Gracenote) was working on Enhanced CDs and the first music and multimedia CDs at ION while simultaneously developing the Bluebook standard -- all with fellow veteran & colleague Albhy Galuten (now at Sony). Ted Cohen was at Philips working on the CD-i at the time. My friend and collaborator Gerd Leonhard was getting ready to launch LicenseMusic.

My pal Jim Griffin was launching his own online firsts at Geffen (with Aerosmith & other artists). Fellow colleague Dave Goldberg (now GM of Yahoo Music) was driving Launch Music. Another good pal, Jeff Patterson (with two pals from UC Santa Cruz) had launched the entire online music movement with IUMA (Internet Underground Music Archive). Todd Rundgren had pioneered one of the first interactive music CDs (as had Peter Gabriel) in that timeframe. Then Todd & I went on to develop Patronet and other very early digital music endeavors online. My book co-author, David Battino, was then editor at Music and Computers Magazine. It goes on and on. Amazingly, almost all of us remain focused on digital music and entertainment in one way or another to this day; we rode the wave, and have survived into what we now dub "phase 2"of digital music. The journey continues; it's interesting to speculate on what we'll be looking back on a decade or so from now.