Beautiful Teams

Not with a Bang, But with a Whimper …

Even before moving into the new offices, we had been sued for copyright infringement by the RIAA (on behalf of the major record labels), the Harry Fox Agency, which owned the publishing rights to a large portion of the songs in our "library," and a number of smaller record labels. ^[15] This had happened January 21, 10 long days after we had gone live with My.MP3.com. While this wasn't entirely unexpected, it was slightly worrisome, especially the language in some of the reports: "clear case of copyright infringement…" etc. Special "All Staff" meetings were called where we were told how this was normal and to be expected. We received updates and assurances in the weekly Chairman's Chat about how we were doing, who we were talking to, how we had enough money in the bank and were fine, but it was worrisome. Meanwhile, we hadn't stopped ripping CDs; instead, we were adding 1,500 new CDs to our database per day.

All said and done, though, I don't remember much open talk or concern about our demise. I'm not sure if this is because people had drunk the Kool-Aid and believed we would be OK—after all, it was in their best interest to believe this (who wants to be unhappy and all doom and gloom when it's your potential fortune at risk)—or if people just weren't talking about it. To be honest, there was a certain air of invincibility that we carried with us: we had a dream team of engineers assembled, had solved every challenge which faced us, had revenue ...