Would you believe that way back in 1995, there was a magazine article about a guy named Peter Gotcher, suggesting that …

In addition to recording and editing on the cheap, musicians are only a high-speed Net connection away from being in the music distribution business. “What would make this a better world is if the independents could compete in music distribution with the major labels,” envisions Gotcher. “That’s the future of music-on-demand, and I want to play a key role in developing the consumer side of that technology.”

Of course, the article was in Wired, so that makes that level of prescience less improbable.

Don’t know who Peter Gotcher is? He was behind Digidesign, the company that created ProTools. Not long after this story ran, Digidesign got bought up by Avid. Gotcher is now a venture capitalist and still kicking around ideas around that side of the music business. In fact, he just poached the head of Yahoo! Music for a new venture.

It seems  a shame that even with people that deeply-pocketed thinking about it in 1995, that developing of tools like 76fanclubs has taken so long.

Hat-tip: Fistfulayen