Print

Preface Think of the stuff you love most: clothes, games, cars, or artwork. One night a genie grants you unlimited ownership to as much of it as you can imagine. How incredible would that be? A feast of everything you love. That’s what it felt like in 1999 as a music-loving teenager using the music file-sharing service Napster. That Christmas, I had just asked for two music albums. Then one piece of software later, I was downloading every album I could think of from the Internet. It was sheer bliss, an endless Christmas morning whereby the number of presents was limited only by the length of my wish list. But as with all genies, this one had a catch (besides Napster’s illegality and eventual shutdown). After gorging euphorically on the music I already knew, I didn’t know what to download next. It’s as if Napster said “the musical uni- verse is yours!” but only provided a map to places I’d already been. It didn’t make sense how could “everything” be available—with the implication that there would always be something new and amazing to listen to—yet I remained stuck in the same musical corner? The search bar, the heretofore king of retrieving what I wanted online, now mocked me. The problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted I’d need to hear it first. There was one work-around, however it was possible to search for music I already liked and then browse the entire music collection of the person shar- ing it. Sometimes this led to great new discoveries (most of the time it didn’t). But when it worked, it really worked and provided a fresh injection of musical bliss. It also taught me that while the Napster software itself didn’t have the right features to help me discover something new, other people using it could. As the Internet continued to rocket the world and global economy into the future, more and more content came online, and the problem of discovery that affected music sharing started to overwhelm other categories as well— everything from e-commerce to video to the news. Today the crisis of dis- covery is at a fever pitch, as people who want to find content they like can’t.