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.”
CHAPTER 7
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).
CHAPTER 8
A new manager was brought in from Denmark Henning Jorgensen. He still lives in North Carolina.
something called the “crime triangle” Known in scholarly sources as “routine activity theory.” Academic criminologists skip the triangle for a Venn diagram, with crime in the middle.
They were almost all guys Of more than 100 Scene prosecutions I have researched, only two have involved female defendants. However, there was for a brief period in the 1990s a releasing group known as GLOW: “Gorgeous Ladies of Warez.”
“Could you, like, FXP me the file, dogg?” In the mid to late ’90s File eXchange Protocol was favored by IRC pirates over the more common File Transfer Protocol.
CHAPTER 9
a key driver for successful artists and businesspeople alike From Iovine’s 2013 commencement speech at USC: “But what I have learned is some of these powerful insecurities can be harnessed into life’s greatest motivator, the strongest five-hour energy drink ever. It’s called a little old-fashioned fear.”
Iovine went after Sisqo; Cohen went after Limp Bizkit Goodman, Fortune’s Fool, 141.
“Big Pimpin’” . . . Carter would himself disown it See John Jurgensen, “Just Asking: Decoding Jay-Z,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2010. He still performs the song, though.
confronted him on the floor of a nightclub and stabbed him The producer was Lance “Un” Rivera. Carter pleaded guilty to the stabbing in 2001 and was sentenced to three years’ probation.
The estimated cost from 1995 to 2000 was half a billion dollars A coalition of state attorneys general, led by Eliot Spitzer, later recouped $143 million in cash and trade product from the recording industry. As ever, the record labels admitted no wrongdoing.
Staffers downloaded the software . . . Joseph Menn, All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster (New York: Crown Business, 2003), 164.
“Fuck the record industry.” As recalled by Eileen Richardson, Napster’s former CEO. When a big-name recording artist later tried to strike a deal with Napster, Richardson said that John Fanning doubled down: “Fuck her, and fuck her million bucks.” Author interview.
Pressplay . . . listicles of the “Top All-Time Tech Busts” See, for example, Dan Tynan, “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time,” PC World, May 26, 2006.
18 record companies, including Universal A&M Records was listed first because the plaintiffs were ordered alphabetically.
Morris was the best-paid man in music Sony’s Tommy Mottola was also very well compensated, but stepped down in 2003.
the average American spending over $70 a year on CDs alone RIAA figures and my calculations. Inspired by Michael Degusta’s excellent analysis of the recording industry’s historical earnings mix. See “These Charts Explain the REAL Death of the Music Industry,” Business Insider, February 18, 2011.
CHAPTER 10
Inside the company a civil war had broken out Frank Rose, “The Civil War Inside Sony,” Wired, November 2002.
“led the development of a standard means . . . called MP3” Charles C. Mann, “The Heavenly Jukebox,” Atlantic, September 2000.
“the father of the mp3” Mark Boal, “Leonardo’s Art,” Brill’s Content, August 2000.
59 million dollars SEC filings show Frankel owned 522,661 shares of AOL stock, then trading at $112.
“widespread adoption of the standard on the Internet” 2001 Fraunhofer Annual Report.