R.E.M.’s manager and lawyer Bertis Downs on how he knew the internet would change music

R.E.M.’s manager and lawyer Bertis Downs had his first inkling of just how serious the digital revolution was going to be at an entertainment law symposium at Duke University in the late 1990s. “This was right before Napster,” he says. “It was possible to download music then, but it was difficult. You had to know what you were doing. I was talking to a bunch of law students, and I asked, ‘How many of you download music?’ Ninety percent of the hands went up. I thought, Oh no. And these are law students.”

Via Business Week