Prologue: The Year of Infinite Streams It was 2008, and the music industry was bleeding. CD sales had cratered. iTunes sold singles like bandages on a hemorrhage, but piracy—LimeWire, Kazaa, The Pirate Bay—was the unchecked artery. The major labels, Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI, sat in their glass towers, terrified of the future.

The body of the email contained only a link and a login. I clicked. A page loaded—old HTML, no SSL certificate, but unmistakably Qtrax. The 360 carousel. The sidebar. The radar tab.

I logged in using a temporary username: historian_01 .