10/12 #2
Our media group worked with several companies, each only slightly less clueless as to how to make a digital music/video distribution model work. The company that came closest was Amplified.com, which was purchased by our parent company Valley Media. With Amplified, our media data served as the backbone for a virtual storefront and platform for the sale of digital downloads, internet radio, disc-recognition capabilities, and a music locker service in 2000--five years before Apple launched iTunes and a dozen years before Apple, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft finally matched all of our offerings. We failed to win over the major record labels or video studios, however, and thus the money dried up when the tech bubble burst....