“I would ask the executives of Time Warner a question: is this what you intend to accomplish with your careers?” Dole had asked. “Must you debase our nation and threaten our children for the sake of corporate profits?”
The answer, at least to the first question, was yes. Morris’ career had never looked better, and if success meant turning “Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks” into a schoolyard catchphrase, so be it. Morris had weathered these hurricanes of political outrage many times before. One of his first signings after taking control at Atlantic had been 2 Live Crew, the Miami booty bass quartet whose strip club anthem “Me So Horny” had startled everyone, Morris included, by becoming a massive underground hit. “Me So Horny” had been the single from As Nasty As They Wanna Be, the first (and to date only) musical work ever to be banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity. Morris had signed 2 Live Crew in the midst of this controversy, and put out their next major label release, Banned in the U.S.A., led by their immortal single “Face Down Ass Up.”
Controversy was temporary. Royalties were forever. Soon, Morris was sure, the Death Row critics would find something else to complain about, just as they had with 2 Live Crew. The moral panic would subside and he would be left to cultivate the label’s singular genius. As he had so many times before, Morris sought to hold on. Though he rarely sat for interviews, he often posed for photographs, and among them was a new favorite, which he kept in a frame on his desk: a black-and-white party shot of himself, dwarfed by Suge and Snoop, smiling alongside Pac, his eyes alight with joy.
If Time Warner could take the heat on “Face Down Ass Up,” they could take the heat on “Gin and Juice.” On the strength of Morris’ signings, Warner Music had moved to the top of the leaderboard, besting the five other corporate conglomerates that comprised the Big Six. Morris, investing in quality, believed it was a position the company could maintain for years. The important thing was to win, and surely Michael Fuchs, with his Jordan-esque greatness, saw it this way too. And so Morris was optimistic as he shut the door to his boss’s office in 1995. In fact, he thought he might be promoted to oversee the company’s entire international music division.
The meeting lasted two minutes. Interscope had become too hot. Time Warner planned to dump it. And Morris was fired.
CHAPTER 4
Their state funding running out, the Fraunhofer team traveled to industry trade shows across Europe and America to promote the mp3 standard. They had a customized booth, with brochures and demonstrations of the technology, but there wasn’t much interest. Struggling to attract potential customers, they kept hearing the same thing: the mp3 was “too complicated.” Meanwhile, across the trade show floor, the mp2 booth was three times the size of their own, and mobbed. Philips had done its job well, dumping promotional money into its own product while undermining the competition.
In head-to-head listening tests the mp3 remained superior. Only Fraunhofer couldn’t get anyone to participate in such tests anymore—MPEG had run those competitions, and everyone knew the results. Standardization of computer hardware had made team member Harald Popp’s expertise less relevant, so Brandenburg reassigned him to sales. In his pitch, Popp told potential customers about the mythology of the “complexity problem” and about the “political” nature of the MPEG decision, but some of his explanations sounded more like excuses.
They were saved in the end by a guy named Steve Church. Grill had first met him at a trade show in Las Vegas the previous year. The CEO of a start-up called Telos Systems, Church was a former radio talk show host and studio engineer who saw a market for improving the quality of audio broadcasting. Like Brandenburg and Grill, he didn’t trust MPEG, as he had seen these “impartial” standards committees make biased decisions before. He agreed to an independently refereed head-to-head listening test between the mp2 and mp3, and was startled by the results.
The mp3 was way better! Shortly after the demonstration, Church called back to the home office in Cleveland and arranged to repeat the experiment over a newly installed digital telephone line. The demonstration material was an encoding of Steely Dan, a band as beloved in Ohio as it was in Bavaria. Telos became the mp3’s first—and for some time, only—enterprise-scale customer. Church commissioned several hundred mp3 conversion boxes called Zephyrs, the size of VCRs, capable of streaming mp3 audio in real time. He then turned around and licensed these to his biggest customer: the National Hockey League.
Here, finally, was a stroke of good fortune. One of the key reference materials in Bernhard Grill’s menagerie of exotic sounds was a recording of a German-league professional hockey game. The sound of scattered clapping had always been a challenge for the encoder, particularly when set against a dynamic soundscape of scraping skates and brutal, bone-crushing checks. The sample was a small snippet of on-ice action, followed by a few seconds of indifferent applause. Grill had listened to it hundreds of times, isolating the encoding errors and working with Brandenburg to implement fixes. The NHL was the perfect customer: the mp3 had been specifically calibrated to the sound of the game.
But the league had certain technical requirements, and these took months to meet. By the time the units finally shipped in late 1994, the hockey players had gone on strike. That year’s shortened season didn’t officially begin until January 20, 1995—the official start date of the mp3 revolution in North America. The fastest game on ice was not widely understood to be a pioneer in digital acoustics, but as the first puck dropped on center ice that year, fans of the Blackhawks and the Red Wings were an unwitting audience on the cutting edge.
It wasn’t until after the 1995 decision in Erlangen that income from the sales finally began making its way to Fraunhofer, arriving just in time to save the mp3 team. The Zephyr racks allowed radio broadcasters to save thousands of dollars an hour on satellite transmission costs, and were installed in every pro ice arena in North America. Telos’ revenues quadrupled, and Steve Church became a zealous advocate for the technology. Soon he was in talks with every major North American sports league. But Fraunhofer received only a small cut. The licensing agreement they’d negotiated with Church charged on a per-unit basis, and there were only a few hundred stadiums to sell to. The mp3 was alive, but on life support; to earn substantial profits, the technology would need many more licensees.
For Brandenburg, that meant a continued push for the home consumer. Earlier in the year, he had directed Grill to write a PC application that could encode and play back mp3 files. Finished within a few months, Grill dubbed it the “Level 3 encoder,” or “L3Enc” for short. The program fit on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk. L3Enc represented a new paradigm of distribution, one in which consumers would create their own mp3 files, then play them from their home PCs. For the home audio enthusiast, the requisite technology was just arriving. Introduced in late 1993, Intel’s powerful new Pentium chips were the first processors capable of playing back an mp3 without stalling. Plus, the new generation of hard drives was enormous: with storage capacity of nearly a gigabyte, they could store almost 200 songs. The biggest limitation was still the encoding process. Due to MPEG’s forced inclusion of the cumbersome MUSICAM filter bank, even a top-of-the-line Pentium processor would take about six hours to rip an album from a compact disc.
No one at Fraunhofer quite knew what to do with L3Enc. It was a miraculous piece of software, the culmination of a decade of research, capable of taking 12 compact discs and shrinking them to the size of one, unencumbered by any digital rights management. On the other hand, the speed limitations of encoding made it cumbersome. After some internal discussion, Brandenburg made an executive decision: to promote the mp3 standard, Fraunhofer would simply give L3Enc away. Thousands of floppy disks were made, and these were distributed at trade shows through late 1994 and early 1995. Brandenburg encouraged his team members to distribute the disks to friends, family, colleagues, and even competitors.