a daring corporate insurrection inside Time Warner For the full story, see Fredric Dannen, “Showdown at the Hit Factory,” New Yorker, November 21, 1994.
“Morris was like an old country lawyer.” Larry Kenswil, author interview.
all of Warner’s A&R men had passed on them From Marc Nathan, interviewed by Michael Laskow on the website of Taxi, an independent A&R company: “A&R had essentially passed on Hootie and the Blowfish, dismissing them really as just a bar band. But a research assistant . . . kept coming up with this band named Hootie and the Blowfish that was selling 50 to 100 pieces in virtually every store in the Carolinas. When the retail sheets were brought to Doug Morris, and Doug said, ‘What is this band Hootie and the Blowfish?’ A&R said, ‘Oh, it’s a bar band, and we passed on them.’ Doug essentially said, ‘Well, get someone to un-pass right away because this is the real deal.’”
“Yeah, but to us, you’re the Michael Jordan of baseball.” Fred Goodman, Fortune’s Fooclass="underline" Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 79. Goodman has Danny Goldberg originally making the crack as a quiet aside, then Iovine repeating it aloud. He cites Iovine as a source.
Henry Luce III . . . was seen applauding Steve Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age (New York: Free Press, 2009), 61.
“I would ask the executives of Time Warner a question . . .” Bob Dole, “Dole Campaign Speech,” C-SPAN video, May 31, 1995.
a black-and-white party shot of himself, dwarfed by Suge and Snoop Morris still has this picture. It now rests on his coffee table at Sony.
CHAPTER 4
a guy named Steve Church Church passed away after a battle with brain cancer in 2012. He was 56 years old. In a tribute page on Telos’ website, he was warmly remembered by friends, family, and colleagues.
L3Enc . . . consumers would create their own mp3 files L3Enc used a DOS-based command line interface. A typical command from 1995 might read:
l3enc track_10.wav ironic.mp3 -br 128000
This tells Brandenburg’s algorithm to compress Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” to 128,000 bits per second.
12 compact discs . . . to one It didn’t have to be a CD. Brandenburg’s algorithm could handle any audio source.
Thomson SA Today known as Technicolor SA.
an engineer to jerry-rig . . . the world’s first handheld mp3 player Robert Friedrich, a Fraunhofer hardware expert, built the device.
in late 1995 . . . a spiky red starburst shouted, NEU! The earliest snapshot of this website on the Internet Archive is dated to August 1996. Grill believes that earlier pages looked similar.
please send 85 deutsche marks From the readme.txt file accompanying early versions of L3Enc.
CHAPTER 5
Hughes Network Systems Today known as Hughes Communications.
a cluttered blue-on-white color scheme This description is based on the Internet Archive’s earliest Yahoo! snapshot, from October 17, 1996.
“AFT: Please tell us about this new concept in releasing . . .” These quotes are copied verbatim from Affinity #3, “Spot Light.” “NetFraCk” is interviewed by “Mr. Mister” and the interview is dated August 19, 1996. The executable file may be retrieved from Textfiles.com, but you will need a DOS emulator to view it. My thanks to Johnny Ryan at University College Dublin for the original pointer.
CHAPTER 6
the so-called “Rothschilds of the New World” This formulation comes from Peter C. Newman’s The Bronfman Dynasty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978).
Bronfman had pushed for reorganization For details, see Connie Bruck, “Bronfman’s Big Deals,” New Yorker, May 11, 1998.
Time Warner had countersued Goodman, Fortune’s Fool, 81. Time Warner and Morris eventually agreed to a confidential settlement, and the countersuit was dropped.
The initial credit line Junior offered . . . was only $100 million Ibid., 81.
Bronfman promoted Morris to run all of MCA Morris replaced Al Teller, who resigned due to “philosophical differences.” That same day, Michael Fuchs, the man who had fired Morris at Warner, was coincidentally also let go. Including Ertegun at Atlantic and Robert Morgado at Warner, Morris had now outlasted his four previous bosses. For details, see Chuck Philips, “Company Town: Music Industry Shake-Up,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1995.
a New Orleans rap conglomerate by the name of Cash Money Records Morris’ A&R team, consisting of Jocelyn Cooper, Marc Nathan, and Dino Delvaille, first brought Cash Money to his attention. For details, see Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New York: Penguin, 2011), 574.
a trancelike state of total concentration My impressions of watching Morris preview a new artist in his offices at Sony.
a piñata for the press The exact quote regarding Bronfman, from an anonymous entertainment executive, is, “He’s like a piñata! Hit him and money comes out.” Bruck, “Bronfman’s Big Deals,” 77.
the term “pirate” was more than 300 years old In 1709, writing for The Tatler, the British columnist Joseph Addison complained of “a set of wretches we Authors call Pirates, who print any book, poem or sermon as soon as it appears in the world, in a smaller volume; and sell it, as all other thieves do stolen goods, at a cheaper rate.”
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a bundled package The simultaneous distribution of L3Enc and WinPlay3 was a boon to early adoption. By contrast, a 14-year gap separated the debut of the home CD player and the home CD burner.
direct links to Fraunhofer’s FTP server See, for example, Digital Audio Crew’s first Scene mp3 releasing tutorial, dated August 30, 1996.
The RIAA would later offer various explanations Specifically Hilary Rosen, corroborated by Kenswil, Brandenburg, and Grill.
transparency . . . achieve it in 99 percent of all cases Even today, certain cherry-picked samples can cause the mp3’s psychoacoustic encoder problems. Castanets are particularly difficult.
Neil Young . . . a losing battle to preserve audio quality Young by his own admission is half deaf from decades of guitar feedback. He is on a quixotic mission here.
twenty different patents . . . two dozen inventors Information on mp3 patents comes from MP3licensing.com, interviews with Brandenburg and Linde, the European Patent Office, and my own tabulations.
Frankel did not bother to license the technology Nullsoft would eventually become a Fraunhofer licensee, but not until after the popularity of the Winamp player was well established, and only under threat of litigation.
in the Constitution, no less The exact text grants Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).