Rob Reid

Festival Appearance:

• Year Zero, Sunday, 5:00 at Decatur Conference Center Auditorium

Rob Reid is a writer and technology entrepreneur based in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. He's the author of Year Zero, a novel about aliens with a mad passion for human music. He also wrote Year One, a memoir about student life at Harvard Business School and Architects of the Web, which chronicles the rise of the Internet as a commercial medium. His other writings have included a cover story for Wired, as well as prominent features in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0, and the Gilder Technology Report. He has also written for countless websites, including Ars Technica, Wired.com, and Spinner.com.

Reid was the founder, CEO, and Chairman of Listen.com, the online music company that developed the Rhapsody music service. Listen was the first online music company to secure full-catalog licenses from all of the major labels. He sold Listen to RealNetworks. Viacom's MTV Networks division later bought half of Rhapsody, and in March of 2010 it was spun out as an independent company. Rhapsody now has over a million paying subscribers.

Year Zero, 2012

In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe -- and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry. Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. And boy, do they have news. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on humanity’s music ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang. The resulting fines and penalties have bankrupted the whole universe. We humans suddenly own everything—and the aliens are not amused. Nick Carter has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly, and he’s an unlikely galaxy-hopping hero: He’s scared of heights. He’s also about to be fired. And he happens to have the same name as a Backstreet Boy. But he does know a thing or two about copyright law. And he’s packing a couple of other pencil-pushing superpowers that could come in handy. Soon he’s on the run from a sinister parrot and a highly combustible vacuum cleaner. With Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick now has forty-eight hours to save humanity, while hopefully wowing the hot girl who lives down the hall from him. “Hilarious, provocative, and supersmart, Year Zero is a brilliant novel to be enjoyed in perpetuity in the known universe and in all unknown universes yet to be discovered.”—John Hodgman, resident expert, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart