I thought this was an interesting piece of Internet history that shows the importance of timing (luck), good UI and content.

As fan of Factory records (in particular the music of Joy Division and New Order but also the graphic design of Peter Saville and Tony Wilson’s attitude), I was drawn to this article. I also have fond memories of the late 90s and early 2000s as a time when interesting people were coming together and doing innovative things e.g., collaboratively building operating systems and encyclopedias (there was a lot of dot-com bullshit as well but I didn’t pay too much attention to that).

Anyhow, I found it amusing that this brave attempt at using micro-payments for digital music downloads back in the days of dial-up Internet was stymied by a very user unfriendly DRM / user interface that Music33 had rolled themselves:

> Songs purchased came in a PDF; users tapped in a password to play the music.

To their credit, Music33 were trying to ensure the artist got a (much) bigger slice of the pie than artists were then getting as royalties from record labels.