The stronger acts like Eminem and Fifty didn’t need this kind of support. They generated real demand by the quality of their music. So Universal’s fake hits tended to be associated with lesser artists: boy band castoff Nick Lachey, hip-hop head case DMX, and trainwreck vanity project Lindsay Lohan. Universal was contractually obligated to promote and support these musicians, even when their artistic output didn’t justify it. That’s where Astroturfing came in, the theory being, if you could make a song seem popular, maybe it could cross some invisible threshold and actually become popular.

And sometimes it worked. In June 2005, Lohan had starred in Herbie Fully Loaded, a reboot of Disney’s The Love Bug. The movie’s theme song was “First,” featuring a desperate Lohan pleading for the attention of a distracted boyfriend. There was little organic demand for this bland effluvia, and in the lead-up to the movie’s release “First” failed to chart. But then, following a tepid opening weekend, the MTV music video countdown show Total Request Live was inexplicably blitzed with requests for the song. The subject line from one of Spitzer’s subpoenaed emails hinted at the true source of the song’s popularity:

FYI: we are hiring a request company starting Monday to jack TRL for Lindsay.

The song climbed into the top ten on TRL and remained there in rotation for more than a month. And on the back of Universal’s shenanigans, Lindsay Lohan’s album Speak managed to go platinum. (Worse still, it appears some brainwashed unfortunates actually paid real money to see Herbie Fully Loaded.) Hits, it appeared, could be manufactured out of thin air—provided you had a phone bank full of low-paid mimics and a few hundred dollars in gift cards.

Morris wasn’t personally implicated in the documents. Universal settled the allegations out of court with a $12 million check and no admission of wrongdoing. It was a signature Spitzer “prosecution”: no one went to jail and, except for the money, there weren’t any real repercussions. But at least it was a signal to the industry to turn it down a notch. Maybe they could also produce some actual hits while they were at it?

But Morris knew that no matter how good a song was, you still had to market it. He had this process down to a science. First you wrote a great song. This was the hard part, but Morris knew a hit when he heard one. Second, you got that song played on the radio and television. Because the airwaves were strictly supervised government-regulated monopolies, you had to be a little careful in this step not to run afoul of the law. Fortunately, the radio stations needed you just as much as you needed them. Finally, you pressed and distributed your album, and after hearing that great hit song on the radio, people went out and bought the entire album on CD.

But now the last step was broken. You no longer had to buy the whole album. Even if you held on to some atavistic notion of paying for your music, you could just buy the mp3 single on iTunes. For years the industry had been selling songs that even their creators acknowledged were not very good. Now they were paying the price. In economic terms, album sales were an example of “forced bundling”—after being bamboozled by Total Request Live, the consumer now wanted to hear “First,” but she had to buy all of Speak to get it. Who needed 12 Lindsay Lohan songs? One was more than enough.

There had been a time, of course, when the musicians had embraced the album. They had written full-length suites that spanned four platters of vinyl. Those had been the Ertegun days, which Morris fondly remembered, when Led Zeppelin would write 12 songs spanning two full-length LPs as part of a holistic artistic vision. You sat at home next to your turntable with your headphones and your spliff and you spent two hours listening to the entirety of Physical Graffiti in sequence. But album-oriented rock had died in the ’80s, the victim of MTV and the Walkman, and for the last twenty years music had been a hits-first business.

Rappers in particular were totally driven by hits. Their singles were dynamite, but their albums were packed with filler: lazy rhymes over half-finished beats, throwaway songs from unheralded apprentices, unintelligible skits. It was more enjoyable to listen to “In Da Club” 16 times in a row than it was to listen to the entirety of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ once. Lying on the floor with your headphones was out; running through the park with your finger on the click-wheel was in. No one listened to a whole rap album, not even the artists themselves. The genre on which Universal had staked its future was the one most perfectly wrong for the hits-driving-album-sales approach.

Morris was familiar with the economics of this new business model—it was really an even older business model, abandoned long ago, and now, against all the odds, brought back to life. When he’d started working as a songwriter’s assistant for Bert Berns at Laurie Records in 1963, the album was still an extravagant rarity. Like most labels at the time, Laurie had instead primarily traded in seven-inch vinyl singles that had retailed for ten United States cents. Morris, who still remembered those days, could see how the new digital approach resembled the old one. Once you adjusted for inflation, the contemporary terms of sale were nearly identical. The album was vanishing. Morris had outlived it.

This—more than piracy, more than bootlegging, more than anything else—was what was really killing the music business. Morris had buried enough unsold inventory in his life to know that the previous system was not terribly efficient. Indeed, in a bad year it sometimes seemed easier to take the discs directly to the landfill, avoiding the cumbersome retail supply chain entirely. From a holistic perspective, then, the digital system produced far less waste and gave consumers what they wanted far more quickly. The only problem was that it didn’t make nearly as much money.

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.