“… it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records. But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.”

- Mick Jagger

It just now occurred to me that 1968 was when The Beatles created Apple Records. 1997 was when the Freunhaufer codec was leaked, allowing everyone to encode their music as MP3.

There were more and more people using this technology to store music on their hard discs. The idea was [originally] that encoders would be much more expensive. ... In, I think it was '97, some Australian student bought professional grade — from our point of view — encoding software for MP3 from a small company in Germany. He paid with a stolen credit card number from Taiwan. He looked at the software, found that we had used some Microsoft internal application programming interface ... racked everything up into an archive and wired some Swedish side, [and] put that to a U.S. university FTP site together with a read-me file saying, 'This is freeware thanks to Fraunhofer.'

"He gave away our business model. We were completely not amused. We tried to hunt him down. We told everybody, 'This is stolen software so don't distribute it,' but still the business model to have expensive encoders and cheap decoders [was] done. From that time on, we reduced the cost for encoders. There was a company, Music Match, which allowed people early on to take a CD's music, read it into the computer and then have their own music jukebox on that. And they were legal, they paid for the patent fees so that was fine.

"When we found out that people used our technology to do unauthorized distribution of music over the Net — that was not our intention, very clearly. I have to say, I don't say that everything the music industry does is correct or good, but still I think we should have respect for the work of the artists and everybody involved and it's only fair that they get paid for it.

"It was in '97 when I got the impression that the avalanche was rolling and no one could stop it anymore. But even then I still sometimes have the feeling like is this all a dream or is it real, so it's clearly beyond the dreams of earlier times."