[kingcharles]

Yes. I was initially in charge of getting all the music from all the major and indie labels into our system when I worked at what was the biggest competitor to iTunes in Europe. It was 100% from CD. I remember at the end we had a storage unit with hundreds of thousands of CDs. We had teams of young girls and guys working day in, day out ripping CDs.

We did our absolute best to get the high quality rips we could. We sat on the forums and figured out what the best CD-ROM drives were, even if it meant buying really expensive SCSI versions.

But none of the labels had anything in digital format in prior to 2003. I think the majors only started their conversions of their catalogs in about 2004 or 2005.

Just some other background I'll throw out there - the company I worked at opened all the doors at most of the record labels. Most weren't ready to sell their stuff online (WTF) and needed a lot of persuasion. After we got them to sign, Apple would follow us in days or weeks later and have a nice easy job. That was how we found out Apple was trying to build a music store of their own.

And Apple had a good time with the labels. At that time, and perhaps even now, most record labels used Macs for practically everything they did, even admin stuff. So when we went in with a mostly-PC demo, they looked at us sideways. Apple could slide in with shiny stuff and impress them more :)

@sivers: Did we have all your catalog? This was OD2 (On Demand Distribution) in the UK. I have a feeling we did?