Hilary Rosen paces the creaking oak floor of the Oxford Union debate hall, eyeing the empty pews the way a Roman gladiator might have surveyed the Colosseum. Rosen is the chair of the Recording Industry Association of America, and in a few hours she'll be standing here in a black formal gown, getting ripped to pieces. Along with several other industry executives, she's charged with defending the proposition: "This house believes that the free-music mentality is a threat to the future of music."
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Richard Ballard Hilary Rosen in the Washinton, DC, office of the Recording Industry Association of America.
Of course, the students of "this house" believe nothing of the sort. "I myself have about 900 megabytes of music on my computer," Dave Watson, the union's president, tells me before the debate. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a group of students who've never downloaded music. You can't stop them, as long as it's free."
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| Rosen Waves Bye to RIAA Hilary Rosen, the music industry's foremost lobbyist and the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, announces that she will resign at the end of the year.
"Are you nervous?" I ask Rosen. She's checking out the two doors students will exit through to cast their votes – one for "ayes" and another for "noes." She looks a little hurt by the suggestion. "I just want to win," she says.
Most people in Rosen's place would consider themselves lucky just to make it out alive. Reviled by college kids, music fans, and more than a few recording artists for the RIAA's role in forcing the shutdown of Napster, Rosen is seen as the embodiment of a venal corporate culture hurtling toward obsolescence. It seems she'll stop at nothing to frighten those who share music online instead of buying it in a store – hacking into networks, threatening universities and businesses, sending out subpoenas to unmask music-swappers. Some Hilary haters have protested her speeches and urged others to mail her excrement. On a scale of odiousness, devotees of the Web site Whatsbetter?com rated Rosen just below Illinois Nazis but better than Michael Bolton (and way above pedophile priests). On the more serious side, death threats once prompted Rosen to travel with security. "People take their free music seriously," Rosen says wryly.
By the time darkness falls over Oxford's Gothic towers, the debate hall is packed with hundreds of students. Rosen delivers her opening statement, a characteristically passionate indictment of file-sharing. In order for artists to record music, she says, they – and record labels – have to make money. And in order for them to make money, people have to stop helping themselves to copyrighted music whenever the mood strikes. That, plain and simple, is stealing.
Over occasional hisses and boos, Rosen asks the students to raise their hands if they've ever downloaded music. Two-thirds do. She asks them to lower their hands if they are buying less music these days. About half oblige. Then she asks the remaining students to lower their hands if they are buying more music. Few do. "That's because it's all rubbish!" someone shouts from the audience. By now there's such confusion that many students look at one another quizzically and jerk their hands up and down.
She has heard, she says, that Oxford students must sign away their rights to anything they create in the course of their studies. "Doesn't this piss you off?" Rosen demands. Crass words for genteel Oxford, but that's the thing about Hilary Rosen: She usually says what she means.
None of Rosen's opponents rebuts her on legal grounds. Commercially speaking, it's hard to argue that peer-to-peer music-sharing doesn't have the same effect as walking out of Virgin Megastore with the latest Coldplay CD under your jacket. But by moralizing the issue – here and in a series of ads featuring artists like Stevie Wonder and Britney Spears – Rosen and her colleagues have failed to grasp the fact that they've already lost. File-sharing has become part of pop culture; witness the Intel ad that shows a scruffy guy happily burning tunes onto a CD-R. To some extent, at least, the record companies have themselves to blame. Whereas blank CDs sell for pennies at the nearest CVS, the price of new releases continues to creep up in most stores, to the point where movies can be cheaper to own.
Rosen, 44, seems to have planted herself squarely in the path of inevitable technological change. In fact, she's far from naive: She knows downloadable music is the format of the future. In her view, the survival of the music industry depends on creating legitimate online alternatives to file-swapping, and she sees label-owned Web sites like pressplay and MusicNet as a way of offering music by subscription, in the same way cable operators deliver movie channels. When the industry figures out how to make those services work, the labels could earn back the income they've lost to file-trading. Until then, Rosen has to pull off an almost impossible balancing act: convincing music executives to invest in online services that won't yield profits anytime soon while also trying to keep the free-music marauders at bay.
As the Oxford debate degenerates into snide attacks on the industry and disgusted groans from Rosen, students begin filing out of the hall. Rosen writes a note on a scrap of paper, folds it carefully, and asks the person sitting behind her to pass it down. The note has my name on it. "I've counted four votes so far through the exit door," her scrawl says. "I'm feeling good!!"
In the end, the number of votes in favor of Rosen's proposition is higher than that – but not nearly high enough. Rosen loses, 233 to 72. "OK, can we just be honest about one thing?" she asks as we leave the hall. "They hate me here!" Oddly, she says this as though she really wants to be loved. "I've spoken to a lot of colleges, and I've never had a reaction like that."
Just then, about 25 students seated outside at a picnic table burst into applause. "It was a tough crowd!" one kid jokes as Rosen walks by. Another calls after her, "We were with you in spirit!"
"Your cynicism makes me feel better," Rosen replies over her shoulder. That's the other thing about Rosen: She usually gets the last word.
"It's absolutely clear that the reason our sales are on the decline is the Internet and CD burning," Rosen declared when we first met. We were having lunch at the Palm, where Rosen's caricature is painted on the wall among a pantheon of such Washington insiders as Dick Cheney and Vernon Jordan. (Rosen is half of a formidable power couple in the capital; her life partner, Elizabeth Birch, runs the Human Rights Campaign, the influential gay rights group.)
"We're never going to stop piracy," Rosen said. "But right now, with the nature of networks and how out of control they are, I have faith that we'll make progress."
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| Rosen Waves Bye to RIAA Hilary Rosen, the music industry's foremost lobbyist and the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, announces that she will resign at the end of the year.
I confessed to Rosen that I, too, am a music thief; the previous night, I had downloaded the remix of Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" from Kazaa. Rosen shook her head intently, and I thought she might end our interview right there, maybe send her steak tips and greens crashing to the floor. Instead she said, "They did such a great job with that song."
According to Rosen, the RIAA – the trade group that represents the five major record companies – isn't so concerned about people like me who download files. "Going after you really doesn't accomplish anything," she said. She's focused on nailing the uploaders who make file-sharing possible. Rosen likes to say that 3 percent of the computers online account for 97 percent of the music uploaded. "We've really consistently tried to distinguish the downloader from the uploader," she told me. "The uploader is the distributor."
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Richard Ballard "Record execs think I'm soft. Everyone else says I'm a hard-ass monster."
None of Rosen's predecessors at the RIAA ever had to talk this way, as if they were narcs on the trail of drug dealers. Before Rosen, the music industry's lobbyists concerned themselves with arcane legislation and sales certification, and had a low public profile to match. Rosen found herself in a very different position just after she took the RIAA's top job in 1998. Although she'd been an association lobbyist for more than a decade, she'd been in charge for only a year when Napster burst onto the scene. By then, the music industry had decided that MP3s were going to be its future, but it hadn't reached a consensus on how to proceed from there. Within a year, file-sharing had reached critical mass and industry executives – always an insular bunch – needed someone who wasn't afraid to take an unpopular stand.
There's little in Rosen's background to suggest that she'd ever end up representing powerful conglomerates against anonymous citizens. Growing up the daughter of an insurance broker in West Orange, New Jersey, Rosen got her liberal leanings from her mother, who was the first woman ever elected to the local town council. She remembers as a small child being wrapped in a frilly dress and put into a convertible for a parade honoring John F. Kennedy in Newark.
"There's a lot of the '60s in Hilary," says Danny Goldberg, chair of Artemis Records. "She's got some idealism, she's got some rebelliousness, and she connects music with those feelings."
Rosen's parents divorced while she was at George Washington University in the late 1970s, and for the first time in her life she had money problems. For a while, she tended bar at Mr. Henry's in the Tenley section of northwest DC, and stayed out all night partying. Her mother was a close friend of Brendan Byrne, then governor of New Jersey, and the two of them didn't think bartending was "an appropriate job for a nice college girl," Rosen says. So in 1979 they conspired to put her to work in Byrne's Washington office. It became the springboard for her professional life.
Almost immediately after college, Rosen began lobbying for a private company on behalf of music publishers, and she eventually rose to become one of Washington's most influential lobbyists. In part, this is a reflection of the industry she represents; according to a breakdown done by the Center for Responsive Politics, the RIAA and the companies that own its member labels donated more than $5 million to parties and candidates in the 1999-2000 election cycle. But her influence is also a testament to her skill in manipulating the political process, which she does with a combination of disarming warmth and tactical ruthlessness.
"She can punch you in the face, and you're still smiling after she does it," says John Podesta, who dealt with her on copyright issues when he was Bill Clinton's chief of staff. Most lobbyists make their living nurturing goodwill among lawmakers, with the understanding that they're saying what they have to on behalf of their clients. Rosen protects her industry with a tenaciousness that can seem personal, giving no ground.
The Federal Trade Commission, for example, has issued several reports criticizing labels for being less cooperative about rating products for children than the film or videogame businesses, and frustrated members of Congress have hammered Rosen on the issue, to no avail. "When she gets her back up against the wall or feels like you're threatening their bottom line, she can be very tough and aggressive, bordering on hostile," an aide on the Hill says.
Some of Rosen's toughness can be traced to her twenties, when she came out as a lesbian and fought on the frontier of gay politics, becoming an early and ardent advocate for AIDS research. I ask Rosen if she thinks the stereotype of a militant lesbian plays into her image as being too aggressive. She considers this. "I never thought of myself as one of those separatist dykes," she says finally. "But I suppose if people see me that way, that's fine."
She pauses. "I can't believe I just said that."
Whatever her personal politics, Rosen keeps them out of the office. When Eminem won his Grammy in 2001, Rosen attended the ceremony, but she went stag. Repelled by Eminem's anti-gay lyrics, Birch boycotted the awards and stayed in Washington with the couple's 4-year-old twins, Anna and Jacob. "She was backstage talking with Elton John and Eminem," Birch says. "I just sat home and threw things at the TV."
Rosen's public persona was defined during the 18-month court battle over Napster, when she was constantly popping up in front of microphones and cameras announcing some new way to put the file-swapping site out of business. Publicly, she emerged as a stern voice for the industry. Behind the scenes, by pulling together the labels, ginning up lawsuits, and preaching her case all over the world, Rosen single-handedly marshaled the forces necessary to push back the power of the digital age. At least temporarily.
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Rosen says she tried "endlessly" to find a licensing agreement that would have enabled the labels to join forces with Napster. But the industry rejected an offer of $1 billion over five years – and Rosen seemed unwilling to settle for anything less than Napster's demise.
"We knew we were losing the PR battle," she says now. "It was a tsunami. But instinctively, I always thought that people thought we were right. They thought it was a free ride, and boy was it fun, but it would never last." Focus groups confirmed this, she says. "So while I knew their political strategy was drawing blood, I knew we'd win."
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Richard Ballard "She became the anti-consumer poster child. It was so unfair."
The victory came at a steep personal cost. As industry figures urged her on from the sidelines, Rosen withstood a level of vitriol that stunned friends. In Washington, it was understood that she was a paid lobbyist. Online, she might as well have been the Unabomber in a pantsuit. One Web magazine likened Rosen to the Antichrist and named her Beast of the Month.
"Hilary went through the kind of experience with Napster that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy," says Zach Horowitz, the president of Universal Music Group. "She received death threats. She received emails that attacked her sexual orientation. She became a poster child for being anti-consumer, anti-technology, anti-freedom – a dinosaur trying to preserve the past. It was so unfair."
The presumption in these attacks was that Rosen was calling the plays for the music business and not the other way around. She seems to prefer it that way; she gets paid $1 million a year to shelter the executives from criticism. But in fact, according to those closest to her, she's not the hard-liner in the crusade against file-sharing. Yes, she's the frontwoman. But there are five CEOs backing her up – and some of them make her look like Mary Poppins. "They still think they should put teenagers in jail," says technology guru Esther Dyson.
In fact, Rosen tried to steer the labels toward the online future long before they saw it coming. In the mid-'90s, Rosen brought Dyson to a conference of music executives to brief them on how technology would transform their business. Dyson described for them the inevitability of digital delivery, an eventuality Rosen says she had begun to understand but wanted her bosses to hear from an outsider. But as Dyson spoke, the label executives became defensive, then furious. By all accounts, the meeting devolved into a shouting match.
Rosen admits that "it's probably just a handful of record executives who think I'm too soft on the issue. Everyone else thinks I'm a total hard-ass monster. And that's fine.
"I think that was very much part of their strategy," she says, referring to the labels. "Everybody could hate Hilary without getting at them. And I wasn't victimized by that. I'm part of it."
Insiders say that, in addition to fighting it out with consumers and legislators, Rosen often leans on her own bosses as well. The labels don't always agree with each other, largely because the companies that own them want different things from the digital revolution: AOL Time Warner has bet its future on the Internet and cable, for example, while Sony is also concerned with electronic hardware. Sometimes the label heads yield to Rosen, and sometimes she yields to them.
Behind the scenes, Rosen has worked hard to convince the Big Five that they can't expect to hunt down and punish music pirates without investing for real in online services of their own; the public won't stand for it, and Congress may not either. So far, however, the industry's online efforts – held up by endless copyright and licensing issues – have been disastrous. While we were in Oxford, Rosen took a call on her cell about a standoff between her companies and the publishing industry, who were arguing over online royalties. When she hung up, she surprised me by venting her frustration.
"I finally convince the idiot record companies that they have to offer a product to compete with pirates, and now the publishers won't make a deal," she said, throwing up her hands. "They'd rather we shoot at each other until we're both dead. It's always one step forward and two steps back."
Hilary Rosen would prefer it if the world's youth didn't think she was hopelessly uncool. She has an iPod. She counts both Al and Tipper Gore, as well as the rapper Chuck D, among her close friends. She helped found Rock the Vote, for God's sake.
But she's not about to show any mercy to the young and foolish. As the forces of free music grow cagier and more diffuse, Rosen is confronting them with the same overwhelming legal force she used to bury Napster. She has repeatedly said that the industry is open to finding online partnerships that work, but she has shown little interest in teaming up with potential partners like Kazaa and Aimster, both of which she has taken to court in recent months.
"We'd be glad to sit down with them," says Philip Corwin, Kazaa's Washington lobbyist. "But when someone's hitting you over the head with a 2-by-4, it's hard to reach out your hand."
Rosen's public image has only worsened as she's intensified her attack on file-sharing uploaders, using tactics that make John Ashcroft look timid. Two years ago, the RIAA began pressuring universities to block students from uploading on their networks, saying it would hold the schools liable. A few months ago, the RIAA and some partner organizations sent a similar, thinly veiled threat to Fortune 1000 companies. Even those in the armed forces aren't immune. In November, the Navy seized 100 computers at Annapolis and threatened 100 students there with court martial in a raid on music-swapping. To make sure schools and companies follow through on their promises to crack down, the RIAA has enlisted moles who log on and request shared files, and then identify the IP address that provided the content. Rosen's forces have also been "spoofing" music downloaders, replacing the tracks they think they're getting with endless (and annoying) loops of a few seconds of music.
More recently, the RIAA served special subpoenas on Verizon and several other network providers, each one demanding the identity of a single user who, according to an RIAA investigation, had uploaded copyrighted music. Verizon, for one, refused to hand over the names of its customers and is fighting the subpoena in Washington's district court. "We're very concerned about what this means for Internet subscribers and their privacy, and also their rights to due process under the judicial system," says Sarah Deutsch, Verizon's vice president and associate general counsel. Rosen says that Verizon and other networks that aren't cooperating are leaving her no choice but to target individual consumers for criminal or civil action, although she wishes it weren't so. "We'd like to have more creative tools at our disposal," she says.
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| Rosen Waves Bye to RIAA Hilary Rosen, the music industry's foremost lobbyist and the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, announces that she will resign at the end of the year.
Rosen doesn't elaborate on what those tools might be. But members of Napster Nation are taking a stand against a new bill, drawn up by Representative Howard Berman, a San Fernando Valley Democrat who is tight with the music biz. The bill would essentially give the record labels a broad and somewhat vague power to hack into your machine if you're a peer-to-peer client. The legislation sets limits on what a company can do – it can't stick a virus on your computer, for instance, or damage your hard drive – but leaves everything else to the imagination of the hacker. Not unreasonably, Rosen's critics assume she's behind the bill. Rosen told me she's had nothing to do with it and doesn't even like it much. "We didn't ask for it, and I think it's poorly drafted," she says. "It bothers me that people ascribe its vagueness to some secret plot of devious intentions on our part."
But that's not what she said when the bill was introduced. In a press release, Rosen applauded the proposal, calling it an "innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy."
Militant downloaders, intransigent record companies, carping congressmembers – even Rosen's close friends wonder how much more of this she can take. Her contract is said to be up for renewal later this year, and the job has taken its emotional toll. What truly pains Rosen, her friends and colleagues say, are the shots she's taken from artists, which grew most intense in 2000 when Congress stealthily passed a "work for hire" provision that made it harder for artists to get the rights to their own songs. Eventually, the provision was repealed, but not before it had prompted artists like Don Henley and Sheryl Crow to lash out at Rosen and form the Recording Artists' Coalition, a development that brought the long-simmering tension between musicians and labels into the open.
"She's put herself on the firing line, and I'm not sure that often enough she's been given all the tools and all the emotional support that's necessary to do that," says Jay Berman, who was Rosen's mentor when he ran RIAA and who now heads the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. "I actually think she needs to take some time off. This has been a very difficult time. It's all gotten so personal."
Ten years out, Rosen envisions a world where recorded music is purchased not just in malls but on computers, cell phones, and cable systems. With CDs, she says, the industry has been selling the equivalent of Coca-Cola in only 1-liter bottles, while in the future, it will have to come in six-packs and fountains and every other kind of package.
"I think we're going to have online subscriptions," she says. "I think we're going to have song delivery. I think we're going to have portability and satellite delivery of new music. I think there are going to be as many ways to deliver music as we can think of."
Rosen's tenure will likely be judged on whether the Big Five keep control over this new world of music, or whether they become part of a bygone distribution system – the milkmen of the digital age.
"I think, like most people who go into politics, she would like to be judged on how much of an agent for constructive change she was," says Jim Griffin, a friend and admirer of Rosen who runs Cherry Lane Digital, an entertainment consulting firm. "But it is a sad commentary that, at least thus far, she will be remembered not as an agent for constructive change, but as an agent standing in the way of constructive change."
