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the distinction of leaking the remix to “Ignition” Kelly himself had leaked the first verse of the song weeks earlier, breaking off listeners with a little preview to the remix. He did not usually do this.
Now 18 APC members were facing felony-level conspiracy charges Seventeen of them reached plea bargain deals. The lone holdout, Barry Gitarts, was found guilty at trial and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
“. . . We are not here to line the pockets of bootleggers” From the NFO for EGO’s 2002 leak of the Dixie Chicks’ Home.
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Warner . . . had been taken over by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. For a book-length treatment, see Goodman’s Fortune’s Fool.
a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company EDC was eventually acquired by Glenayre Technologies, a wireless messaging firm. Glenayre would then take the EDC name.
Morris . . . now publicly vented against Apple See Billboard, “Red Hot Chili Peppers, QOTSA, T.I. Rock for Zune,” November 11, 2006. His exact words were: “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, so it’s time to get paid for it.” The remarks came as Morris was himself trying to get into the mp3 player market. In exchange for providing licenses to sell its music, Morris negotiated for Microsoft to pay Universal a percentage for every Zune it sold. Since the Zune tanked, this amounted to almost no money, but a similar deal with Apple would have made him a fortune.
his critics in the digital era Chief among these was Bob Lefsetz, author of the Lefsetz Letter, a widely followed industry blog. Morris referred to him as a “chirping bird.”
“Females 18–24, all Black” Email sent July 11, 2003, requesting the campaign, submitted as evidence by the New York State Attorney General’s Office. The cost of this fakery was $1,750.
“we are hiring a request company . . . to jack TRL for Lindsay” Email sent June 18, 2005, submitted as evidence by the New York State Attorney General’s Office. The names of the sender and recipient of the email are redacted.
selling songs that even their creators acknowledged were not very good The situation was especially bad for established acts. Joe Walsh, formerly the guitarist of the Eagles, recalled the pressure from the suits for a follow-up to the band’s top-selling Greatest Hits album: “The record company didn’t care if we farted and burped. It was alclass="underline" when can we have it? They would put that out, because that was their whole corporate quarter.” History of the Eagles, directed by Alison Ellwood (Jigsaw Productions, 2013).
Wayne got weird For more on this period in Wayne’s life, see The Carter, directed by Adam Bhala Lough (QD3 Entertainment, 2009).
“The mixtapes were obviously very concerning to us as a label . . .” Knopper, Appetite, 247.
What if . . . the FBI started leaking albums themselves? The idea is floated in Patrick Saunders’ FBI case file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The idea is killed by the Computer Crimes section’s senior counsel, citing experience with industry contacts. It is unclear from the heavily redacted file if the FBI had ever done this before.
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Pink Moon had sold more copies than . . . in the previous quarter century See “Rock Star Back from the Dead,” Birmingham Post (UK), April 7, 2000.
an alphabet soup of file types—FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec, an open-source standard from the same group that developed Ogg. Because it does not use psychoacoustic methods, it achieves compression rates of only 60–70 percent. However, as it is a lossless encoder, the original audio can be reconstructed from the compressed file.
“the world’s greatest record store” Ben Westhoff, “Trent Reznor and Saul Williams Discuss Their New Collaboration, Mourn OiNK,” Vulture, October 30, 2007. Reznor went on to explain that he remained a patron of the arts, and had paid Radiohead $5,000 for his copy of In Rainbows.
He used the music-tracking site Last.fm Ellis’ Last.fm account has since been deleted.
“second enclosure of the commons” James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain” (Creative Commons, 2003).
“The TUBE BAR prank calls . . .” Email submitted as trial evidence.
“there was nothing left to upload” Similar complaints may be found today on What.cd.
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The beef had made the cover of Rolling Stone Evan Serpick, “Kanye vs. 50 Cent,” Rolling Stone, September 6, 2007.
a coworker pulled him aside Jerry Swink, a maintenance worker at the plant.
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only one . . . had been brought to a jury trial Several other defendants would later take their cases to trial. They all lost.
Thomas appealed the ruling The case of Virgin Records America, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset is endless. The judge in the first trial vacated the first ruling of $222,000 in damages and ordered a retrial. Thomas was found guilty again at the second trial, and the jury ordered her to pay an astonishing $1.92 million for pirating 24 songs. The same judge called this amount “monstrous and shocking” and reduced damages to $54,000. Thomas refused to pay, and appealed. A third trial was held to determine damages. The jury in that trial ordered Thomas to pay $1.5 million. The amount was again reduced to $54,000, which Thomas again refused to pay. She appealed to a higher court, which then reinstated the original damages from the first trial of $222,000. Thomas then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which rejected her petition.
the music industry’s sacrificial martyr See Nick Pinto, “Jammie Thomas-Rasset: The Download Martyr,” Minneapolis City Pages, February 16,
2011.
“There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist . . .” Seth Mnookin, “Universal’s CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He’s Giving Songs Away,” Wired, November 2007.
“World’s Stupidest Recording Executive” This was later softened to “Is Universal’s Doug Morris the Stupidest Recording Exec Ever?,” Mary Jane Irwin, Gawker, November 27, 2007.
Jackson . . . rights to the majority of the Beatles catalog For a longer discussion, see Stephen Gandel, “Michael Jackson’s Estate: Saved by the Beatles,” Time, July 1, 2009.
over the remaining million dollars, they would flip a coin Carter offers his own take on this event in the lyrics to the song “Run This Town.”
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What.cd’s music archive grew to surpass even Oink at its peak It also became a trophy case for the holy grails of online piracy. J. D. Salinger’s leaked “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” was first posted there, as were high-resolution full-color scans of all 2,438 pages of Nathan Myrvhold’s 52-pound cookbook, Modernist Cuisine.