For Universal’s lawyers, the finding was a vindication of the RIAA’s strategy. Average citizens with no vested interest in copyright law had found in favor of the recording companies, and awarded surprisingly heavy damages. You really could sue the average file-sharer, and you could win. Thomas’ case was a landmark judgment.
But from a financial perspective, the RIAA’s victory was a farce. Thomas, a single mother of two who lived in a small rented apartment and worked on an Ojibwe Indian reservation, would be bankrupted by the judgment. Regardless of the outcome of the appeals, it was widely understood that the RIAA would only ever receive a small fraction of the damages. It was also widely conceded, even by the RIAA’s lawyers, that Thomas herself was digitally unsophisticated, with only a limited understanding of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology and no connection whatsoever to the elite-level Scene members and torrenters who actually ran the world of music piracy. She was the music industry’s sacrificial martyr.
Contrast that with a real pirate. A month before the Thomas ruling, the FBI, after years of effort, had finally broken the Rabid Neurosis crew and picked up the Scene’s inside man: Bennie Lydell Glover. Here was a packaging line manager who on his own initiative had leaked almost 2,000 albums over the course of more than eight years—the man who destroyed the music industry to put rims on his car. Glover had pleaded guilty and was now offering to testify against his coconspirators, but the RIAA would never seek financial damages.
The problems continued: quasi-legal digital storage lockers like Megaupload began to appear; peer-to-peer file-sharing moved to torrent sites; rival leaking groups emerged to take RNS’ place. The war on piracy looked like the war on drugs: costly and probably unwinnable, even in the face of felony criminal prosecutions. Lil Wayne’s new album Tha Carter III was the first to capitalize on his post-Dedication fame, but it was leaked too—not by Glover, but by one of Wayne’s own producers. The leak came months in advance, and Wayne responded by creating a new “intermediate” album titled simply The Leak.
Between 2006 and 2008 Wayne had appeared on at least 200 tracks as a featured artist, not even counting his own mixtapes and albums. The entirety of his output during this period was impossible to catalog. This ubiquity brought mainstream attention, and when the final version of Tha Carter III arrived in stores, it was a hit—sort of. The album moved nearly three million copies and was the bestselling release of 2008. But it failed to do even half the business that Get Rich or Die Tryin’ had done just five years earlier. The same numbers in 2000 wouldn’t have put it in the top ten.
The album was dying. Doug Morris, however, was doing fine. Presiding over an industry in free fall, he was still earning almost 15 million dollars a year. He owned a waterfront mansion in Syosset with a tennis court, a boat dock, and a pool. He owned a condo on a key in Sarasota. His new apartment in Manhattan had an incredible view. He traveled by private car and private jet, and he sat on the boards of the Robin Hood Foundation and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He inhabited a world of privilege, populated by celebrities and powerful CEOs. The world’s most famous musicians dropped everything to speak with him, and even Steve Jobs returned his calls.
During his time at Universal, he had so far grossed more than a hundred million dollars in aggregate, and this by a considerable margin made him the highest-paid major label CEO. His fortune began to attract attention from outside the insular recording industry world. Trade organs like Billboard and Variety had always gone easy on him, but he had a target on his back now, as Bronfman once had, and the mainstream press was after him.
In late 2007, Morris agreed to an interview with the journalist Seth Mnookin for Wired magazine. The resulting article portrayed Morris as the clueless relic of an earlier age. Morris, as always, tried to hide behind the hits, and insisted there wasn’t a thing he could have done differently. Mnookin let him hang himself.
“There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”
Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person—anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.” Morris’ almost willful cluelessness is telling. “He wasn’t prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology,” says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. “He just doesn’t have that kind of mind.”
Morris was furious with Mnookin’s portrayal of him. He felt the article was a hatchet job meant to appeal to Wired’s technologically savvy reader base, complete with an unattributed quotation that implied he was kind of dumb. Morris felt he had a fine mind, particularly for the business he was in. The vet analogy was a poor one. A better one would be to compare the music business to Mnookin’s own: journalism, perhaps the only field that had handled the digital transition worse than music.
The quotes from the interview weren’t hypotheticals. Several people with good bullshit stories had gotten past him, and he’d watched both Vivendi and Time Warner squander tens of billions of dollars of capital. Shareholders at those companies would have been better off if management had never even heard of the Internet. Morris himself had wasted tens of millions of dollars on online ventures like Pressplay that had effectively generated zero revenue. The aggregate investment experience in technology threatened to do the unthinkable: to make A, the capital he drew, greater than B, the capital he returned. And that was the one thing Morris would never let happen.
And, really, what could he have done differently? If there was some other record industry executive who’d done better, who’d taken a different path, maybe the case could be made. But the decline of the music industry had affected every player, from the largest corporate labels to the smallest indie. Morris had once been a gatekeeper, the guy you needed to get past to get into the professional music studio, and the pressing plant, and the distribution network. But you didn’t need any of that stuff anymore. The studio was Pro Tools, the pressing plant was an mp3 encoder, and the distribution network was a torrent tracker. The entire industry could be run off a laptop.
As an arbiter of cultural trends, Morris remained unimpeachable. In the past two years, his labels had signed Rihanna, Rick Ross, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and—best of all—Justin Bieber. Doug Morris didn’t understand the technology, but he did understand how to turn an unknown YouTube busker with microwaved hair into a global superstar, and his hot streak was now almost twenty years long. Universal had done everything right, everything a label was supposed to do, investing in and grooming A-list talent from around the globe and outsmarting all its competitors. And now, in addition to that, he was supposed to be some kind of tech guru? If so, was Karlheinz Brandenburg expected to sign Lil Wayne? Was Seth Mnookin expected to invent the Kindle?
Maybe. One thing was certain: the interview was a low point in Morris’ career. He was the target of satirical cartoons and a great deal of vicious Internet flaming. The website Gawker, reblogging other people’s work with characteristic restraint, called him the “World’s Stupidest Recording Executive.” The anger was shared by many of his employees, some of whom in fact were gifted technologists who had passed up jobs in Silicon Valley to work for him. “He made the company look ridiculous,” Larry Kenswil, the chief of Universal’s digital strategy at the time, would later say. “That was insulting to a lot of people inside the business.”