“Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. “ Nothing is free!” they want to shout at those blithely participating in these platforms. These new forms of music consumption, the daughters agree, pose an existential threat not only to their father’s legacy, but to the music industry itself. This “squeamish” first-person-plural narrator is two adult daughters of a successful music producer they work for their father’s company and are clearly dumbfounded, at the turn of the century, by what they see as an utter violation of the sanctity of the music they sell. Remember a time when we got uncomfortable about seeing and being seen online? The idea made us squeamish it was like letting a stranger rummage through your house - or your brain! Once the Internet was inside your computer rifling through your music, what else might it decide to look at?” “People were letting the Internet go inside their computers and play their music, so that they, too, could play songs they didn’t own without having to buy them. Its context is a reaction to the music sharing revolution of the early 2000s: Napster, Limewire. This is the sentence in which we first encounter the title of Jennifer Egan’s novel.
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