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....
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