Illustration: John Hersey
Bill Nguyen sold his first company, Onebox, in 2000 for $800 million. Then he built a mobile email provider, Seven, into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, leaving in 2004 as majority owner. Next he did what any unemployed rich guy might do: took vacations in St. Tropez and Vail, went surfing in Costa Rica, acquired a garageful of very fast cars.
One day in the winter of 2004, Nguyen was having dinner in San Francisco with friends Chris Collingwood and Brian Young of the band Fountains of Wayne. They had known each other since the group played a corporate event at Seven a few years earlier. The conversation turned to child-rearing. Come on, they implored, don't let your kid grow up with a self-indulgent dad on permanent vacation. Nguyen replied that he had nothing left to prove in the software industry. Why don't you fix the music industry, then? they suggested half seriously.
Nguyen could think of a bunch of reasons why he shouldn't go near the music industry. CD sales had dropped almost 20 percent since 2000. Peer-to-peer transactions — dominated by pirated media — accounted for almost 60 percent of North American data traffic. Tower Records had just filed for bankruptcy. The industry was in free fall. Yet the more Nguyen thought about it, the more intrigued he became.
Nguyen's complaint with the way music is sold online — whether it's CD purchases or downloads — is that there's no easy, legal way to listen to a song before you buy it. A 30-second snippet on Amazon.com or iTunes is rarely enough to form a good impression and certainly not enough to get a tune stuck in your head. Nguyen's solution: Give the music away. Later this year, his new company, Lala, will begin streaming any track or album the user selects, for free, betting that the chance to explore the sonic landscape will get listeners excited. As they take in artists and genres they might otherwise never hear, music fans are going to want to own the songs, Nguyen says — and Lala will be right there to make that possible, via whatever channel and format the customer prefers: downloading tracks, trading discs, or even (gasp) buying the CDs. It's a model he believes will revive the music industry.
