The 10 Stupidest Tech Company Blunders

18.08.2009

Perhaps no other industry has missed more tech opportunities than the music business.

In 1999, Shawn Fanning's Napster made it incredibly easy for people to share music online. The for contributing to copyright infringement. Then-Napster CEO Hank Barry called for the music industry to that paid royalties to artists for music distributed via the Net. His calls fell on deaf ears.

Napster fans quickly moved on to other peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as Gnutella and Grokster, and music "pirates" became the RIAA's public enemy number one.

In 2000 MP3.com launched a service that allowed members to upload songs from their own private CD collection and stream them to any PC. The and eventually won. MP3.com was sold and changed business models.

Add to all that the Kazaa, and some 30,000-odd music "pirates." Talk about your broken records.