Right around the time I came up with the Great Idea, I was taking a Sociology class called "Music and Social Movements." For my final paper, I wrote about the implications of the digitization of music. I asserted that digitization, coupled with this little thing called the Internet, was going to end the music industry as we knew it. Because digital copies could be infinitely copied with no degradation in quality, and because distribution would be so close to free as to be essentially free, a marginal cost per copy of zero meant that the supply of any digitized music (i.e. all music being recorded at that time, and everything analog that had been digitized) was functionally infinite. Infinite supply meeting finite demand would dictate that the cost of recorded music would fall, basically, to zero.
This was 1994. I was nineteen years old. Five years later another college kid would write a computer program called Napster. You know what happened next.