Here is a thirteen-year-old kid whose older brother runs away and leaves him a massive record collection. It’s the early 1980s. The kid loves rock-n-roll and he knows he’s not alone, so he tapes his brother’s records and sells the cassettes to his schoolmates on demand, until the principal busts him. The kid obsesses over audio equipment, too — every weekend, he works at Audio Breakthroughs, which sells the best gear on Long Island. When college rolls around, he gets into several good schools. The University of Vermont prevails among them because he sees a “Steal Your Face” sticker in a Redstone window, and knows he will find other Deadheads there.
He becomes an economics major. He gets an A in computer science. He loves his film class with Professor Ted Lyman. The rest of his college life he orients around Dead tours and other music shows. He dives into the Burlington scene, watching Screaming Broccoli and Ninja Custodian downtown, and descending to the basement of Slade Hall to check out a new group called Phish. For The Cynic, he writes reviews of national acts that come through town, the likes of B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
When he graduates in 1989, he is tall, charming, tenacious; his voice has the same pleasant rasp as Hugh Jackman’s. He could go the way of Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous; he could follow the bands, could become a groupie then a roadie, or a writer, a critic. Instead he travels to Europe and has a stint selling audio equipment in Amsterdam and Stockholm.
In Europe, he makes two discoveries that will set the course for the rest of his career — and possibly the future of music consumption on this planet.
One discovery is the internet. True, he was not exactly alone in that, but this was early 1993, before Netscape, before the Mosaic browser, before there were any commercial sites on the Web. He buys a Mac in Sweden, and he gets online.
The other find is more obscure, a print magazine called Mondo 2000. The brainchild of a self-described “street rat” named R.U. Sirius, Mondo 2000 explores virtual reality and the cyberpunk lifestyle. One day the founders of Wired magazine will also count the publication as an inspiration.
When our traveler moves back to San Francisco to start a CD-Rom game company, he goes to the Macworld Expo and stops by the Wired booth. He recognizes its groundbreaking mission, its edge — it reminds him of his own favorite magazine. When he hears that Wired intends to start an ad-supported website, he blasts them with the considerable force of his enthusiasm. He composes a handwritten letter and delivers it. And finally he gets a call, inviting him to be part of the first sales team on the internet.
Fast forward to the present: David Hyman is as warm and unpretentious as the nineteen-year-old who once loped onto Redstone humming “Shakedown Street” under his breath, and he is sharp, hardworking, and has a gift for anticipating the next big thing. These days, he happens to be founder and CEO of what might be the next big thing: it is called MOG, and it is a cloud-based music streaming service that gives its listeners access to millions of songs, plus music blogs, a slider that automatically builds a playlist from your specialized tastes, and Thom Yorke’s latest DJ mix.
MOG occupies a converted warehouse in Berkeley, California. With its glowing crannies of computer screens, exposed ceiling beams, and album covers tacked to the wall, the office projects sleek professionalism layered over by start-up chaos. Arriving at the conference room, Hyman mirrors the aesthetic, sporting a button-down and jeans, a mirthful look, and a near beard.
“Let me use the white board,” he says at one point when describing his company’s evolution. Then he glances over his shoulder at the blue-inked brainstorm already scrawled all over it, shrugs, “Nah,” and picks up where he left off.
Which is music. Always music. Despite his high-power tech reputation, Hyman’s tale never strays far from his first love. “I just can’t imagine my life without it,” he says.
Hyman is, earnestly and unabashedly, the ultimate music fan. The history and success of his career suggests that, in the past fifteen years, the fan may have had an even greater influence on contemporary listening than labels, critics, or even the artists themselves.
“When I walked onto the floor of Hotwired, it was the most incredible place on the planet,” Hyman says of the first commercial Web magazine, which was housed under the same company as Wired. “Everybody there knew something that the rest of the world didn’t know yet.” To give a frame of reference, in 1993 only six hundred World Wide Web sites existed.
Hyman’s enthusiasm for Hotwired was infectious. He sold the second online ad in existence, to Virtual Vineyards. Then, through a colleague, he met Michael Goldberg, the founder of another internet first: Addicted to Noise, a site for daily music news and album reviews.
“The idea of daily music news was in and of itself revolutionary,” Hyman says, shaking his head at the old frontier days. As he recalls how he joined Goldberg, then negotiated the site’s merger with SonicNet, a New York-based music site, it becomes clear why Hyman is so effective at selling his ideas. His body and voice are relaxed, but his hazel eyes brighten, his smile intensifies and envelops, he is transferring his enormous likability to you, just take it, buy this ad, support this product, listen to this song.
In the late nineties, SonicNet became one of the hottest music destinations on the Web. “I remember going with David to the Billboard Music Video conference where we announced SonicNet’s first $1 million deal — a partnership with Levi’s to bring thousands of full-length music videos to the Web for the first time,” says Nicholas Butterworth, SonicNet’s founder. “We hit the trifecta — something great for consumers, great for artists, and good for us as a business. Not an easy thing to pull off, and it would never have happened without David Hyman leading the way.”
Butterworth is one of many to praise Hyman’s keen intuition and leadership. “David has unbelievable instincts,” says Fred Seibert, who was MTV’s first creative director and now owns Frederator Studios. Those instincts told Hyman to jump ship soon after MTV bought SonicNet and dodge the dot.com bust. He expanded a small core-technology company called CDDB into Gracenote, which now provides an infrastructure that services billions of searches a month, and then left once again to pursue his dream of a site that would connect the world’s music fans through their personal tastes.
To understand how a site like MOG is changing the face of music consumption, you must first go back in time to the dawn of radio broadcasting. Before stations began to crop up in the twenties, the concept of playing music over the airwaves to thousands of listeners had no predecessor and therefore no financial model. In 1922, manufacturers, retailers, and newspapers paid for the broadcasting, but by 1930 nine out of ten stations were partly supported by ads. Consumers traded a few minutes of their attention for the chance to listen to free, curated music. Taste-making had passed into the hands of anyone who could afford a station, and also to anyone who could access a listening device. You did not have to own a single album.
In June 2005, a year before Twitter, when Facebook was still open to only college and university students, MOG launched as a music sharing and blogging site whose mission was “discover people through music and music through people.”
At MOG, fans could share parts of songs, but copyright prevented true exchange. “Hardcore music geeks gravitated toward MOG,” says Hyman. “And soon we were joking about how we were the best music site in the world, but with no music!”
It took four years and a lot of Hyman chutzpah to change this, but by December 2009, MOG began to best its online competitors with superior design, a stronger, more diversified ad platform, and access to twelve million tracks. By fall of 2011, Hyman also made deals with BMW to put MOG in the Mini, and with Vizio, LG, and Samsung to incorporate MOG into their smart TVs. All these maneuvers depend on a high-end market: in order to get the most out of a MOG subscription you’d want to own a smart phone, a laptop, a smart TV, and hopefully a Beamer.
Yet Hyman has also recently brokered an ad-supported, free version of the subscription site that gives extra hours of music listening to users who share their favorites with friends. The more you share, the more time you get. For the budget-conscious, it’s like getting free ice cream for telling a few people that your favorite flavor is mint chocolate chip. And it reinforces the idea that leasing a lot of songs for a low or no cost is far superior to owning a few songs for a high cost.
“It’s a risky and expensive proposition to love music,” says T. Jay Fowler, MOG product lead, recounting how much he once spent on vinyl, then CDs, then mp3s. But with MOG, it’s different. “You don’t have to wait for something to come to the record store, and you can try something without risk.”
MOG also offers a solution to the internet’s most devastating effect on the recording industry: file-sharing. In 2008, when MOG was still only a fan network, famed music producer Rick Rubin joined its board of directors “because of David and his passion and excitement for music.” Yet Rubin has been declaring the subscription model a potential industry lifesaver since 2007. As more and more people join, the model counteracts piracy by making it a nonissue: If you want to share a track with friends, you don’t have to buy or rip it. You can just send them a link through MOG.
“Since people have always bought music in an à la carte manner, it will take time for them to get used to a model where all the music you want is always available,” says Rubin. “One has to experience it to see how great it is. As a music fan, I can’t imagine ever going back.”
When David Hyman is not knee deep in technical innovation, he is a husband and father who plays classic rock tracks during dinner and quizzes his two children on the songs and bands. “It’s the School of Rock,” he says genially.
Does he ever contemplate how his career is going to change his kids’ relationship to music?
“I’ll start getting teary-eyed,” he says, smiling and wincing at once. He thinks a moment. Outside the conference room, his company hums with the conversations and clicking keyboards of engineers and marketers.
“Everything we do,” he says of MOG, “makes music more important in people’s lives.”
“I hope that my children’s lives can be as enriched by songs as mine has,” he says, then adds with great seriousness, “My whole mission is to give back to the artists. When I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking, ‘How am I helping Neil Young?’”
This story originally appeared in the spring 2012 issue of Vermont Quarterly magazine. To read the entire issue online: uvm.edu/vq.