Read more: “Tech before its time: Six gadgets too good, too soon“
Imagine a portable music player that holds just a single hour of content, interrupts your listening with 30-second advertisements, and whose store offers none of your favourite songs. And all this could be yours for the bargain price of $299.
If this doesn’t sound like much of a deal, keep in mind that back in 1996, pairing an MP3 player with a dedicated music store was a radical idea. Before the Listen Up player and Audiowiz store were introduced by Audio Highway – a start-up in Cupertino, California – downloading music was possible. But if you wanted to listen to that music on the go, your best option was to burn the songs onto a CD. The seamless coordination of today’s iTunes store, which lets you browse, buy and download your music to your iPod in under a minute, was unimaginable.
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The inspiration for this new model, says Audio Highway’s then-chief executive Nathan Schulhof, came from the try-before-you-buy shareware often used to sell software at the time. “I thought you should be able to do the same thing with music,” he says.
The press swooned. Among other awards, Schulhof’s invention grabbed top honours at the 1997 Consumer Electronics Show, the Oscars of gadgetry. It seemed to be on the road to global domination. And then – nothing. The Listen Up player vanished, to be reinvented four years later when Apple’s iPod became the definitive king of MP3 players.
What happened? Simply put, Schulhof’s technology was a few steps too far ahead of its time. In 1996, less than 1 per cent of the world was online and most computers did not have USB ports. That meant Listen Up users had to connect it to their computer by way of a parallel port, and then link the computer to the internet by way of a modem that could only digest 28.8 kilobits per second. Downloading 1 hour of content this way would have taken about 2½ hours. The Listen Up could hold at most 32 megabytes – the equivalent of about 20 songs.
You’re not listening
By the time the iPod arrived in 2001, technology had caught up with content: though it was about the same size and cost as the Listen Up, the iPod could hold 5 gigabytes. Even if it could have held 1000 songs, however, there was a much more fundamental problem with Audio Highway’s player and store. “At that time you couldn’t get the mainstream music,” Schulhof says. His firm just didn’t have the resources to enter into the kinds of deals that would have let it sell popular music to customers. Most of the content on AudioWiz was news and audiobooks – not enough to entice most people to shell out $299, especially when even that meagre content featured advertising slots.
It took a heavy hitter like Apple to wrangle the tunes people wanted. When Apple’s iTunes Store launched in 2003, Steve 91av had already negotiated the rights to sell music. “They were the first to do it right,” Schulhof concedes. “They just had better content.”
Schulhof’s device may have slipped into the mists of history, but at least he got a slice of the Apple pie. Exactly how much is sealed in various court documents, but Schulhof’s name appears on a number of , though Apple never officially licensed his patents. An agreement with the company prevents him from discussing the matter.
But there can be no doubt about his bragging rights. “I’m a visionary, and sometimes visionaries have things ready before the public is ready to make a change,” he says. According to his website, he is the “” – an industry now worth billions.