Making music

Since the birth of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster in the late 1990s, the record industry has been the unwilling poster child for entire businesses being overthrown by the march of technology. The major labels, once all-powerful, now stand Ozymandias-like, looking out over their barren empires; an ailing HMV, long ago diagnosed as terminal, is finally in its death throes; and it looks increasingly unlikely that music will ever be paid for again. An industry that’s resorted to The X Factor is an industry in trouble.

Michael Breidenbruecker is the co-founder of the music streaming and recommendation service Last.fm, one of London’s big tech success stories. ‘When we started in 2000,’ he says, ‘there was no market. People pointed out that their computers didn’t have speakers, and asked how an internet music service like ours was going to get around that — and we didn’t have a clue.’ What they did know was that everyone suddenly had gigabytes of music, and no way of filtering out the rubbish.