“I told you I was in Carmel?”

“Seeing Neil, you said.”

Neil Watson, one of the superstars of the pop music world of the past twenty years.

“Yeah, to get fired.”

“No!”

“He’s going with … get this, SAV-More. Yep, the big box store, like Target and Wal-Mart. They’re producing him and backing his road shows.”

“I’m sorry about that, Barry. But I’m not talking to Global. Really.”

Dance’s website flew below the radar of the big business of music but she was aware of what Barry Zeigler was talking about: a complete shift in how people got that most addictive of drugs, music.

Before the nineteenth century, music was something that one generally experienced live—at concerts, opera, dance halls, bars. In the 1800s, the powerhouses of the Industry became the publishers of sheet music, which people would buy and bring home to play themselves, on the piano mostly. Then, thank you, Mr. Edison, wax cylinders came about, played on phonographs. A needle in an etched groove of the cylinder vibrated and reproduced sound through a flower-petal-like speaker. You could actually listen to music in your home, anytime you wanted!

The cylinders became disks, to be played on various wind-up machines—phonographs, gramophones (originally an Edison phonograph competitor), Victor Talking Machines, Victrolas and others. Soon the devices were powered by electricity, and in the late 1930s the miracle substance of vinyl became the standard for the records, which were differentiated by the speed at which the turntable revolved: originally 78 rpms, then 45 for singles and 33¹/₃ for long-playing, or LPs.

Later in the twentieth century, tape became popular—sound-faithful but inconvenient reel-to-reel models, followed by cassettes, perpetually looping eight-tracks, and then CDs, optical compact discs.

And though the media changed over the years, people could be counted on to spend millions and millions of dollars to bring music into their homes and cars. Artists often performed, of course, but concerts were mostly a form of promotion to sell the albums. Some artists never set foot on a stage and still grew rich from their music.

But then something happened.

Computers.

On which you could download and listen to any song or piece of music ever recorded.

In the new world order, disks and tapes weren’t needed and the record labels, which made fortunes—for themselves and artists—by producing, pressing and distributing albums weren’t as important either.

No longer did you have to buy a whole album; if you liked only two or three songs on it (and wasn’t that always the case?), you could pick what you wanted. It’s a mixed-tape universe nowadays, thanks to dirt-cheap download and streaming companies like Napster, Amazon, iTunes and Rhapsody and other services—and satellite radio—that let you listen to millions of tunes for a few dollars a month.

And you could even have most of your heart’s desires for free: with music, as with so many other creative arts in recent years, a sense of entitlement has grown pervasive. The little inconvenience of the copyright law shouldn’t stop you from getting what you want. YouTube, the Pirate Bay, BitTorrent, LimeWire and dozens of illegal file-sharing arrangements make virtually any song available free as air.