Leah Callon-Butler recently wrote that crypto’s rock-and-roll era is over, and she’s mostly right about the arc. But I lived inside the music industry when rock and roll actually died, and there’s more to the story.

I was a product lead at Universal Music during the torrent era. I sat in the rooms where executives decided to sue grandmothers instead of building Spotify. I watched them spend more on lawyers than on artists. And eventually, I got fired for pointing out that we’d already lost.

So when someone uses rock and roll as a metaphor for what’s happening in digital assets, I know what the metaphor actually contains.

Here’s what the rock and roll era ending actually looked like from the inside. The loudest, most exciting part of the…