![\"Download](\"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/ayearofsongs\/images\/blogimages\/DownloadCheater.jpg\")
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O<\/span>nce upon a time there was a magical kingdom, ruled by a magical king.<\/p>\n The king had himself once been a knight errant but through his adventures he’d earned a small fortune — more importantly, he’d learned magical powers from the wizards of the east.<\/p>\n In those days, the most powerful magic in the in the land was so potent, it was known by just three letters — IPO. Even today, though the magic has faded, those letters are still very powerful.<\/p>\n But, in those days, the magic of the IPO was everywhere.<\/p>\n And most notably in the magic kingdom founded by the wandering knight. Through the magic of IPO, the knight was able to raise almost a half billion pieces of gold. (In our time, that would buy 33 thousand Toyota Corollas, fully equipped with factory air and power windows and locks.)<\/p>\n But the magic of the IPO required that the kingdom appear to be a happy and prosperous kingdom — so the king decided to give money to his citizens every time someone heard one of their songs. (Did we mention this was a kingdom of musicians? Weird, huh?) The king called it Pay for Play… PfP.<\/p>\n As one might imagine, this was greeted with great joy by the citizens of the kingdom. Most of them had never received a single shekel for their music and never expected to.<\/p>\n But with great good fortune, sometimes comes danger. And in the magic kingdom, this danger showed the face of greed. <\/span>Soon, the musician citizens were learning devious magic of their own, pretending to listen to each others music, and pocketing the money.<\/p>\n The king seemed oblivious to the trouble in his streets. But he must have realized that, in a kingdom of musicians, there could only be so many people listening at a time — for he tried various means to lure travelers in to hear his musicians.<\/p>\n One of the lures was in the form of big lists of the most popular songs, which he called “charts.”<\/p>\n Soon, the biggest cheaters in the land were at the top of the charts, based on music that no one really heard. And sometimes the greedy musicians were also magicians <\/span>and they plied the devious tactics of their trade, esoteric magic like IP Masking<\/span>. They even used soulless robots to listen to music for them…<\/p>\n But a few musicians in the magic kingdom raised their voices in protest [that’s where today’s song comes in. —TK<\/span>] , calling out for their fellow musicians to eschew greed and trickery… to do the right thing and to stop tricking the king and working the evil magic that kept the banal and vapid music of IT wizards at the top of the charts.<\/p>\n But it was already too late.<\/p>\n Unknown to all but those who were conversant in the esoteric writings of The Business Section, a strange and terrible new magic was eating at the very foundation of the magic kingdom…<\/p>\n And it was this strange and terrible magic which brought down the magic king, who was forced to sell the magic kingdom for little more than a song to one of the old kingdoms once known as The Seven Sisters. But that’s a story for another time…<\/p>\n [I’d like to acknowledge that the story above is hardly the first fairy tale telling of the rise and fall of a rags-to-riches-to-rags internet\/IPO story — probably not even the first to apply such a format to the story of the not-quite-named startup above. BTW, all that remains of that once-high-flying company is its dot com nameplate, now simply a portal for commercial music promotion.]<\/p>\n\n