Griffin grasped the technology, von Goeben knew CompuServe, and Wood understood where the industry was headed. They brought the Internet to Geffen-not just the computers, but the fledgling culture. It was the brainchild of three fairly new Geffen employees: Jim Griffin, Robert von Goeben, and Luke Wood. Offering a song for digital download was a tech experiment, carried out both for its industry-altering potential and for the hell of it.

The history and context of that first download is even deeper still and not quite so easily brushed off as a corporate ruse. Devin Schiff at Motherboard's sister site Noisey went longform on an event that may be remarkable in large part for what it didn't accomplish. CompuServe was even kind enough to wave its $10/hour connection fee for the event, while technology thinkers cried conspiracy, with SonicNet (a proto-sharing site) founder Tim Nye telling the New York Times that Geffen's move was really just a ploy to try and convince internet users that 'net' technology was still too shitty for media downloads to be practical, and thus stave off the inevitable: sharing. The three-minute WAV file took users 60 to 90 minutes to download, filling 4.3 megabytes of space in consumer hard-drives that, at the time, would've been not much larger than 100 MB in capacity total.

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