In the book “Exploding - The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group,” Stan Cornyn brings us back to the Consumer Electronics Show of 1976 - the place and date where the electronics companies unveiled a tiny square orange button on the already ubiquitous portable cassette player.

Every kid in the country had a portable cassette player. And every kid in the country loved to crank his own personal soundtrack on the neighbohood basketball court. In my hood, BTO or Edgar Winter or Ted Nugent or that new song “Eruption” by some new band called Van Halen could be heard echoing off the blacktop at all hours. And every kid had to buy two copies of his favorite album: vinyl for the bedroom, and a cassette for the walking around times. They had no other option. And this double-down scenario was a boon for the record business.

Until the dweeby, greedy engineers at Nakamichi, Sony, Toshiba, et al, wheeled out a little orange devil: the RECORD button. The button was in-set on the ordinary PLAY button of the cassette player. And to every record company CEO, the RECORD button was like a nuclear launch button aimed directly at his year-end bonus. This little button packed one hell of a punch: it would allow people to steal music–anywhere, any time. And, long before the days of SoundScan, Big Champaign or BDS, the execs concluded that the RECORD button could erode, and eventually destroy, the prerecorded music industry. Now, all you had to do was buy the LP version of the new REO Speedwagon album, and tape it. No need to purchase the cassette version.

Music execs believed that the RECORD button was a Big Threat to Big Music. And so they stepped up interest in the shiny circular music data carrier being developed by the Philips Electronics lab in the Netherlands - the Compact Disc. The CD was meant to be the ultimate antidote to the cassette duplication problem. And it was, for a long time, but more on that later….

Far away from the executive washrooms of record honchos - on the south side of Milwaukee to be exact - my older brother, Scott, was making pause tapes direct from the airwaves of WMSE, the local college radio station. My brother would hover over the cassette player for hours - PLAY and RECORD buttons in the active position, his index finger covering the PAUSE button, ready to be depressed, ready to record - STEAL - a song. Right. Off. The. Airwaves.

Here’s the thing: from my brother’s pause tapes (many of which I still have), I heard, for the first time, some of the most incredible music: the Clit Boys, the Dead Boys, Die Kreuzen, Bad Religion, REM, Bauhaus, Modern Lovers, The Police, The Smiths and on and on….

Thanks to the RECORD button, I was introduced to, and fell in love with, Tones On Tail, Revolting Cocks, Love And Rockets, Jesus And Mary Chain, Shriekback, Violent Femmes, Gang of Four, and a hundred other bands that formed my musical framework. From ‘stolen’ music, I made sense of the world, and caught the music bug – big time.

Flash forward to today: thanks to another so-called dangerous threat to Big Music – file sharing and disc ripping - kids today are catching that bug. But today’s RECORD button is a bit different, and doesn’t require a stack of Maxell C90s.

Today, as we famously know, kids are sharing song files, ripping CDRs and treating the shopping mall music stores as if they are some sort of Byzantine vitamin shop. While this is surely a sizeable problem, and has undoubtedly cut into everyone’s slice of the pie, the function of falling in love with music has never been better. Or easier. I’m sure of that. And if kids are ‘stealing’ music from us – but falling in love with bands and songs, and making sense of their world via music - it is a massively good thing for all of us. We need people to keep falling in love with music. No matter what. No matter how.

And that is the music business that I suit up for every day.

Why am I a qualifying Idiot? My partner Peter Walker and I co-founded a label in 2004. We named it Dangerbird Records - after a Neil Young song from 1975.

I bet if I looked hard enough, I could find that song on one of Scott’s mix tapes….