Blog

In 1999, a company I founded called Emusic.com had some unique competition.

We had legally licensed a large amount of independent music and were selling it in MP3 for $0.99 per song and $8.99 per album. However, we had this unique competitor known as Napster. We learned strategic subscription billing when we were “selling water” and Napster was “giving beer away for free.” Under pressure, we switched from $0.99 to the original “Emusic Unlimited” monthly automatic billed subscription service and we found we could not only compete with free, but could scale business on that model to $100s of millions of dollars.

We saw something coming. We knew that everything as a service was going to be the future of online content, gaming, and software. Any product or service that can have the physical removed from it has or will. We like to call that transition the Services Tsunami. Over the next few weeks and blog posts I plan to lay out what trends we saw and understood in 1999 that we finally see coming true as 2009 has just ended.

But first, welcome to our Soapbox.