Pick a Day

Music History Events: Technology

October 30, 2006 Keane becomes the first major act to release a song on a USB memory stick. For £3.99, fans can purchase the 512MB drive at HMV stores, plug it into a computer, and transfer the track "Nothing In My Way" along with various videos and screensavers. The "single on a stick" format would fail to catch on.

April 11, 2006 For the 25-year anniversary reissue of David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts album, the multi-tracks for two songs - "A Secret Life" and "Help Me Somebody" - are made available for download, for fans to remix and upload to the website.

May 11, 2000 Napster, which lets users download songs posted by other users for free, wins the Webby award for best music site, beating out Launch.com, Wired Planet, sputnik7 and FarmClub.

July 21, 1999 MP3.com, a website that lets users download music files for free, goes public and quickly reaches a valuation of $6.9 billion. Months later, they're sued by various record companies and the RIAA. In 2001, it sells to Vivendi for $372 million.

June 1, 1999 Napster, a file-sharing service that lets users download songs for free, goes online. It shuts down in 2001 amid a raft of lawsuits, but not before upending the music industry, which sees a steep decline in sales of CDs.

December 17, 1997 MP3.com goes online, allowing independent artists to make their music available for download. It goes public in 1999 but runs into legal problems when posting music by major-label acts. In 2001, it's sold to Vivendi, which sells it in 2003 to CNET, which is just interested in the domain name.

June 24, 1993 The California band Severe Tire Damage pull off the first webcast in history, live streaming a concert from the Xerox Research Center in Palo Alto to an extremely small audience. The next year, The Rolling Stones become the first major artist to do a webcast.

June 18, 1985 Weird Al Yankovic's Dare To Be Stupid, featuring the Devo-inspired title track, makes history as the first album of comedic music ever released on compact disc.