Few Frank Zappa fans would deny he was a musical innovator. But an extract from his 1989 autobiography reveals the musician came up with a business model for filesharing years before the digital revolution began. An article on the Techdirt website highlights a number of passages from The Real Frank Zappa in which the Freak Out! musician discusses the impact of home cassette taping on the future of music.

"It is our proposal to take advantage of the POSITIVE ASPECTS of a NEGATIVE TREND afflicting the record industry today: HOME TAPING via cassette of material released on vinyl," Zappa wrote, before putting forward the argument that the phenomenon of home taping would never be a huge threat because of poor sound quality.

Zappa then writes: "We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [QCI], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home-taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer-level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself ... the main chip is about $12)."

The business model Zappa proposes is remarkable as it anticipates a market that had yet to develop and offers a solution to a problem with which the music industry is still grappling. Zappa concludes, "All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc, would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system".

The world may not have heeded his prophecy all those years ago, but maybe Steve Jobs was reading?