What's funny is that Microsoft and its partners did all the groundwork to open up the labels and gave Apple an easy ride. I was working with Peter Gabriel and he could call any record label in the world and get us a meeting to show the demos. The startup I was working for would go in and it would spend a lot of energy proving to the labels that digital was the endgame and CDs were eventually going to die. This was a very hard job.
And then a couple of weeks after each demo we'd get a call from the labels and they would tip us off that Apple had come to show them something special that they were working on, and of course that meeting went a lot easier than ours...
(also every record label on Earth was using Macs not PCs, so Microsoft's software either had to be run on a laptop we took, or we had to show them Microsoft's absolutely awful Mac software. PG, bless him, gave me his personal iBook for testing (complete with all his passwords and AOL account), which he probably got from Jobs, but I was in a belligerent anti-Mac era so I shoved it in a closet with the button nailed down and stuck it on that "hold the button" game for two years)
