A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about

A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared about: “You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.” My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes Music Store. It wasn’t peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners in content are always those who make it easy. p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going to a theatre!