Some of Universal’s artists were also beginning to sense this shift in economics. Why pay some crooked DJ to play your song when you could just put it on the Internet? Why bother with a traditional album release cycle that was undermined by leaking at every step? In fact, why even put out an album at all? There was nothing sacred about 74 minutes of music. That wasn’t an aesthetic decision. It was just the storage limit of a compact disc. Why not just put out some songs?
At the avant-garde of this economic model was Cash Money Millionaire Lil Wayne. Both Wayne and his label had been struggling, and Spitzer’s payola investigation had shown that even Birdman’s Big Tymers were resorting to bribing radio stations for spins. Worse, many of the label’s original stars had defected after feuding with Birdman and Slim over royalties. 2004’s Tha Carter had been intended as Wayne’s comeback album, but somehow it had leaked from the Universal supply chain exactly two weeks early and failed to even go gold in its first year. “Go D.J.” had been a minor hit, but, outside of New Orleans, people didn’t talk about Wayne much anymore. He was in danger of flaming out, like his estranged buddy Juvenile. And the purgatory of forgotten “Lil” rappers awaited: Lil Romeo, Lil Bow Wow, Lil Caesar, Lil Keke. . . .
Wayne got weird. He grew out his dreads and covered his body with goonish tattoos. He smoked weed like it was his job and developed an addiction to codeine-based cough syrup. His voice became screwed up and froggy. His production turned psychedelic. In 2003, he’d been a skinny, unexceptional adolescent delivering basic-sounding rhymes over basic-sounding beats. By 2005, he had transformed himself into The Illustrated Man, and his auto-tuned music sounded like garbled transmissions from outer space.
He started dumping all of his output to the Internet for free. With no promotional budget and no radio play, and in addition to his normal album release cycle, Wayne started putting out two to three mixtapes a year. Traditionally, the mixtape was what you put on the streets as a demo, to get you signed to a label. But Wayne had been signed to a label since he was 12, and that wasn’t working for him. Musically, the mixtapes were great, much better than his albums. They were weird and fun and danceable, and full of layered, witty lyrics that rewarded multiple listens. They borrowed beats from other albums, songs from other rappers, and then improved on them, sometimes dramatically. There was 10,000 Bars, Da Drought, Da Drought 2, The Prefix, The Suffix, Blow . . . dozens of underground tracks, tracks he made no money from, tracks he couldn’t make money from, since they featured uncleared samples that would get him sued.
In late 2005, Wayne teamed up with DJ Drama, an unsigned producer from Atlanta, for a new mixtape called Dedication. Drama had some buzz about him; he had already released mixtapes for the up-and-coming Atlanta rappers T.I. and Young Jeezy. Dumped to the Internet in December, exclusively in mp3 format, Dedication was a surprise hit that ignited both artists’ careers. Its popularity came not through the radio, but through the blogosphere, where the hip-hop heads were astonished at how good Wayne had suddenly become. The “new” Lil Wayne started getting all sorts of press, from tastemaking websites like Pitchfork and Vice.
Five months later, Lil Wayne reunited with Drama for Dedication 2. The mixtape was smart, and funny, and strange, and profane, and weird in a fascinating way. It sampled everyone—Outkast, Biggie, Nancy Sinatra—and paid no one. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and even The New Yorker all called it one of 2006’s best releases—establishment accolades that would have been unthinkable for Wayne just two or three years earlier. By leaking his own stuff first, Wayne had rebooted his career. As Jay-Z and Eminem were complaining about the leakers, Wayne was embracing them. Better than any artist before him, he leveraged the Internet hype cycle to his own advantage. His boast of “best rapper alive” started to get taken seriously.
But the mp3 revolution was not yet complete: the 2005 model iPod, at $300 retail, was still a luxury good, and most of Wayne’s younger urban fan base couldn’t afford it. They were still in the compact disc era, and Drama was serving them by producing and distributing the mix CDs wholesale on dedicated burners in his Atlanta offices. The discs made their way to urban record stores, where owners reported the sales through SoundScan, with Billboard reporting the numbers straight. The mixtapes started to chart, even though they used unlicensed samples and weren’t technically albums at all.
The resurgence of the Cash Money imprint seemed to bewilder the Universal executives. Distribution rights for the label had been folded into Motown Records in 2004, and Morris had brought in Sylvia Rhone to manage it. Morris had hired Rhone before, years earlier, while at Time Warner. At Warner’s Elektra imprint she had excelled, particularly at managing committed fan bases for groups like Metallica and Phish. Morris admired her, and she was a proven operator. But at Motown, she didn’t understand what Wayne was doing. “The mixtapes were obviously very concerning to us as a label,” she would later tell Rolling Stone. “It really goes counter to what we would like our artists to do.”
This and dozens of similar quotes added to the general aura of cluelessness surrounding the music executives. This led to an embarrassing episode a year later, when local law officials, working with Brad Buckles at the RIAA, arrested DJ Drama on suspicion of bootlegging. Drama’s Atlanta studio was raided and thousands of his burned CD mixtapes were confiscated. Those CDs had been labeled “For Promotional Use Only,” but in practice they’d been sold for cash. And since these mixtapes technically contained unlicensed samples, this to the eyes of law enforcement looked like conspiracy.
Officers at the scene told Drama he was being arrested on a racketeering charge. The incident was a telling misstep. Drama had relaunched the career of Universal’s newest, most popular rapper, and the RIAA had responded by orchestrating a raid on his studio. For some time, confusion reigned, but in the end he was never formally charged with any crime.
At the federal level Special Agent Peter Vu was struggling too. After three years he’d made little progress on Operation Fastlink and the RNS case. It’s possible he might have missed a critical lead. In 2005, after a meeting with the RIAA, someone at the FBI had filed an internal memorandum that referenced the Kings Mountain plant as a potential source of leaks. But after the divestiture of Universal’s CD manufacturing assets, the agents had not followed up on this report.
Instead, they tried a more unorthodox approach. RNS’ leader, whom Vu now knew as “Kali,” seemed to communicate only with Scene members who had established a long track record of insider access and leaks. So what if the FBI created such a track record? What if, with the cooperation of the record industry, the FBI started leaking albums themselves? If Lil Wayne could do it, why not the Feds? It was the sort of undercover tactic that agents had used in the past to infiltrate narcotics trafficking groups and the Mob. But the idea went nowhere—the music industry had made it clear that under no circumstances would it ever permit the FBI to leak a prerelease album.
That left just one lead: the remaining pirates from APC. Once again, Prabhu and Vu canvassed those who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2004. They continued to shake the APC tree for quite some time, until finally in early 2006 someone finally cracked. His name was Jonathan Reyes, of College Station, Texas, and he was known online as “JDawg.” Reyes had established contact with a member of Rabid Neurosis, and, through a shared FTP server, thought he might be able to provide the suspect’s IP address. The FBI pursued this lead, and, finally, in late 2006, Vu reported to his superiors with the good news: he’d finally wiretapped the Internet connection of a member of RNS.