Why did you move from political activism with Rock the Vote to a music BBS like SonicNet?
I didn’t found SonicNet but I was friends with the founder and I didn’t want to be in politics for my whole career. In 1994, I got obsessed with AOL and had my first moment of realization that the online medium was something really incredible that would empower people and grow. When I saw SonicNet, which at that time was just a few months old and was a BBS with four modems and a 486 box, I thought, gee, we’re going to create the next national music brand and build a competitor to MTV. Rather big thinking for a little BBS, wasn’t it? I thought this was the only way you could create a nationally recognized music brand, because the economics wouldn’t support a new national cable network or a music magazine. But I also thought that consumers really needed control over their music choices and they wanted access to much more diverse programming than they could get. Remember, this was 1994. There had been a lot of consolidation in the radio industry, with fewer formats available on the FM dia
