Apple Music Blues

Once upon a time, way back in 1998 I co-founded Musicurry.com, India's first online radio station. We digitized a lot of popular Hindi music by converting from cassette tapes, CDs and even recording some live performances.

There was no Saavn or Dhingana or Spotify.

But we were way too early. The broadband connection did not exist. People still used 56k modems to connect to an ISP and browse the still HTML internet. Streaming audio was all done with RealPlayer encoded in RealAudio, MP3 technology was just a couple of years old with just a few players that could encode/decode them.

Consequently, we had a very small user base of people who could afford a hi-speed modem and were technical enough to install RealPlayer and stream songs from our Musicurry website.

We pivoted soon after a year or so and ultimately sold it off to continue life as a record label.

How times have changed.

Now there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes listening music online.