Jim Griffin died of a heart attack on Monday, October 19, 2026, his son Hazen told the Pho list two days later. For more than thirty years Jim was one of the clearest and most generous voices on how music and the Internet could work together, and the friends he gathered around a bowl of pho became a worldwide community.
Who Jim was
Jim started in newspapers. After communications studies at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Kentucky, he worked in the electronic newsroom of the Lexington Herald-Leader, then became an International Representative for The Newspaper Guild in Washington, D.C., working on new media and technology for journalists and other media employees.
In 1992 he began consulting for Geffen Records, and he ran its technology department as director of technology from 1993 to 1998. In June 1994 his team released Aerosmith’s “Head First” on CompuServe, the first full-length commercial song released online. Geffen World, the label’s internal network, was one of the first corporate intranets.
In 1998 he started Cherry Lane Digital with Milt Okun’s Cherry Lane Music Group; the same company later became OneHouse LLC, which Jim owned and ran. From 2008 to 2010 he was President of Network Licensing at Warner Music Group, where he led Choruss, an effort to license music sharing on college campuses for a flat fee. He testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2000 at its hearing on file sharing and music licensing, appeared as an expert witness in copyright royalty proceedings, advised the World Intellectual Property Organization on copyright and music licensing, and taught music copyright law at NOVA, Northern Virginia Community College.
In 1998 he co-founded Pho with John Parres: Sunday brunches in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, then a daily mailing list on the digital delivery of art. Pho brunches spread to other cities, and in 2004 Pho was a finalist for Billboard’s Digital Entertainment Award for best online community. Jim was still hosting the list in 2026. In June 2026 its members proclaimed “Jim Griffin Day” on the 32nd anniversary of “Head First.”
His ideas
Jim’s central idea was that music was moving from a product to a service. The ListenSmart.com Board page quoted him:
“entertainment is transitioning from a product to a service, and we help our clients to make that transition.”
The weekend Sean met him, in October 1999, Wired reported from a music business conference in Emeryville, California, with Jim arguing that neither the record industry nor the free-music camp had the right model, and that music should “feel free” through some form of subscription:
“We know information cannot be free. [But] conditioning people’s access on their ability to pay [for music] is equally as abhorrent.”
ListenSmart.com’s own bulletin board reposted his thinking in February 2001, introduced as “Board Member, Jim Griffin”:
“We must realize that our digits will flow like water from their source to their destination.”
“We must accept that our best hope is in business models that destroy the consumer’s motive to pirate, not their mechanism.”
A decade later, after Choruss, he put the task simply:
“Our key task ahead of us is to make it faster, easier and simpler to pay for music in hopes that when it is faster, easier and simpler more people will pay.”
Jim and ListenSmart.com
Sean had admired Jim’s work since the 1994 “Head First” download. They met in person on the weekend of October 16–17, 1999, at the MB-5 music conference, where Sean heard Jim moderate a panel and give the Sunday-morning keynote. Sean wrote to him afterwards: “there is almost 100% overlap between your philosophies/vision for the future and the principles that I founded ListenSmart.com upon,” and asked for his input “as a consultant and perhaps even as a future member of our Board of Advisors.”
Jim added Sean to the Pho list that year, and he agreed to join the ListenSmart.com Board of Directors with Ted Cohen and Paul Bandrowski. The company’s Board page lists all three. At the company’s one Board meeting, Paul Bandrowski came to Columbia, Maryland, in person, and Jim and Ted Cohen dialed in.
His thinking ran through the site. Artists on the bulletin boards quoted him, and in February 2001 the boards reposted a long passage of his, with ListenSmart’s summary of his view that “2000 years from now, music as a ‘product’ will be a tiny blip on the radar screen of history.” When Baltimore Magazine quoted Sean in January 2001 that “Music will be treated as a service, rather than as a product,” the idea was Jim’s, and Sean said so in 2017: “I was not a poet in this quote, rather I was a parrot. I learned these concepts in the quote almost verbatim from a true visionary, Jim Griffin.”
In May 2001 Webnoize named Jim conference chairman of Webnoize Events, the role Ted Cohen had held for Webnoize ’98 and ’99.
In Sean’s words
“I first met Jim in 1999 and he became a Board Member of my first Internet startup ListenSmart.com and continues to be one of the smartest minds in the space – to this day.”
“Jim is absolutely one of my heroes. I have learned so much from him that I have applied far beyond the ListenSmart.com experience.”
In July 2020, when Jim was rereading the Pho archive for a book, Sean asked for his old posts and told him he had been “quite active as a contributor from late 1999 (when you added me) until late 2001.” Jim wrote back:
“Your contributions were epic, provoking as they did deep discussion on getting people paid. Especially creators.”
We miss him.
Pho 87
Pho 87, in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, is where the Sunday Pho brunches met and where Jim met his wife, Stacie. These are Sean’s own photos from those brunches. He sent them to Jim and Stacie in December 2018, after Jim told the list how they had met.
Sources
- Hazen E. Griffin, “Bad news,” Pho list, October 21, 2026.
- James Griffin, testimony and CV, Copyright Royalty Board, 2006 (newspaper career, Geffen, Cherry Lane Digital and OneHouse, Senate testimony, Pho’s 2004 Billboard nomination).
- Los Angeles Times, “Rocking the Net,” April 8, 1996 (“Head First,” June 1994).
- STM, Jim Griffin (Geffen World, Choruss, Pho, July 2000 Senate testimony).
- American Society for Collective Rights Licensing, Jim Griffin (Warner Music Group Network Licensing, WIPO, teaching).
- Jim Griffin, LinkedIn profile (President, Network Licensing, Warner Music Group, 2008–2010).
- Billboard, “What Ever Happened To Choruss? An Interview with Jim Griffin”.
- Wired, “Who’s Gonna Own the Music?”, October 18, 1999.
- ListenSmart.com, Board of Directors page (archived April 21, 2001), and “Napster and ‘Viral Marketing’”, bulletin board, February 2001.
- Webnoize, Webnoize Events, May 16, 2001 (Wayback Machine).
- Sean Fenlon, letter to Jim Griffin, October 1999 (company files); ABOVO post, March 12, 2017; ABOVO post, April 17, 2019; email, 2023; Pho list exchange with Jim Griffin, July 7, 2020; Sean’s first-hand account of the Board meeting, 2026.
- Pho list, “Jim Griffin Day,” June 27, 2026, and Jim Griffin’s own post on meeting Stacie at Pho 87, November 30, 2018; Sean Fenlon, emails to Jim and Stacie Griffin with Pho 87 photos, December 1 and 5, 2018 (photos).