“Once upon a time, children, there was a whole industry built on nothing but distributing music.”

“Grampa, what’s disturba… distrab…?”

“Distributing? It means that a person takes music that other people make and sells it to people who want it.”

“Why couldn’t people buy it from the people who made it, like we do?”

“Because it wasn’t always easy for people to find out about music then. There was no GlobalNet, no AI assistants to track down things for you, and people had to spend most of their own time doing things they didn’t want to just so they could get money for food.”

“I know, and you had to walk barefoot to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways.”

(A chuckle.) “That’s right, William.”

“So what happened to these disturbiters?”

“It’s distributors, Jeremy. They were greedy. For a century, everyone who wanted music had to come to them, and they’d gotten fat and lazy. The Internet came along, but instead of welcoming the chance to give people more of what they wanted for less cost, they tried to shut it down. They threatened artists who didn’t play their way, and sued the people who tried to listen to music too.”

“They sound mean.”

“They were, Alice.”

“So what happened to them?”

“They finally realized that they’d made a big mistake, but by then it was too late. More and more artists and customers were avoiding them, and their sales just kept dropping. Finally they all merged into one company, and it just kept shrinking until one day it just disappeared.”

“I’m glad their gone, Grampa.”

“So am I, Dierdre. So am I.”