When a digital-music underground began to emerge in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, most prominently with rogue platforms such as Napster, the hope was that the playing field would be leveled, that artists would be able to go direct-to-fan in delivering their music, and improve their odds of getting heard and possibly even getting paid. It certainly terrified the music industry, which met the new digital era with its usual blunt-force incomprehension and sought at first to ignore this new threat to its monopoly and then to sue it into oblivion. I once received a call in the late ‘90s from a major-label executive who had been reading my reporting on the new digital reality. “What’s an MP3?” he asked. “And how do you find one?”