When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 he wasn't quite sure what the point of it was. So he sat down and made a list of the possible uses for his new device which he submitted to the North American Review in 1878. He thought, perhaps, it could help clocks announce the time, enable the preservation of accurate language pronunciation, record the last words of the dying for family posterity and many other things. Buried somewhere in the middle of that long list? The reproduction of music.
I heard this story from a talk that Kevin Kelly gave last year and was reminded of it once again while reading this article by former VC, Peter Sims which talks about how it's often the little bets that become the billion dollar ideas. Not the big bets. Which is true because of this insight: most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them. And that process is best enabled when entrepreneurs look at things through "affordable losses" rather than calculating expected gains from the start. True of Pixar, Twitter and, I guess, the entire industry of recorded and reproduced music.