Hyman's 30-minute talk, while spellbinding, raised issues of feasibility that seemed insurmountable. Would audiophiles want to spend the time required to rip their favorite tracks to a computer's hard drive? And wouldn't a drive large enough to hold high-definition audio files be prohibitively expensive?

Only three years later, Hyman's dream has materialized. Hard-drive storage capacity per price point has jumped almost a hundredfold. Gracenote has become the international leader in digital media technology and services, providing complete management systems for digital media. There has been explosive growth in the number of online music vendors—iTunes.com, Rhapsody.com, Urge.com, and Napster.com, to name a few—that sell or rent downloadable music to music lovers.