•IN THE MID-2000S, amid declining revenues from slumping CD sales, the music industry was offered two possible futures. The first was created in 2006 by Daniel Ek, whose new product, Spotify, streamed music from the cloud instantly, as if the music had already been downloaded directly on your device. Users could pay a subscription price—today it's $10.99—and listen to as much music as they wanted.
The second came courtesy of Radiohead, with the release of its album in 2007. Listeners could pay what they felt was a reasonable amount (the average was $5) to download the album, or they could purchase the physical album as a richly designed disc box including an LP, a bonus CD, and an art book—for $80. Ethan Diamond, an entrepreneur who had created an email platform called Oddpost that got absorbed into Yahoo Mail, turned this model into Bandcamp in 2008, a platform where artists would
