Chapter 143

“Thank God!” Jill said. She had come out of the house to greet us as soon as we turned into the driveway. “Why aren’t you answering your phones?”

I slid mine out of the sling and looked at it – off. Liz glanced down at the one in her hand and her face told me it was in the same shape as mine.

“We’ve had other things on our minds,” Liz said.

That caused Jill to pause and look at me.

“Is everything still good?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Maybe,” Liz answered. This time I didn’t give her time to expound.

“What’s up?” I asked.

I had been out of contact for a little more than two hours. The world had turned upside down in that brief period of time and a storm that had been brewing for a decade was fully in force by the time we got back.

MusicMayhem, the fourth-largest streaming music service in the world, was no more. The website had gone offline before I’d left for my appointment. While I was at the hospital, the staff had been let go and the COO, the CEO and the CFO had flown the coop with whatever money they could put their hands on.

The public outcry had forced the federal government to move with surprising alacrity but by the time the FBI arrived at the Hoboken, N.J., offices, they were empty except for a lone man who was going from desk to desk and using a sledgehammer to destroy every single computer in the place.

The man barely spoke English and it was pretty evident that he was just hired to do the job – but he had been paid $5,000 in cash and he seemed to do the job thoroughly. Every hard drive that had music, documents or financial information was in bits and pieces and every single piece of paper in the building was shredded – right down to the lunch menus from nearby restaurants.

It was immaterial in the grand scheme of things.

The first class-action lawsuit had been filed in federal court in New York shortly before 10 a.m.

Nashville followed a few minutes later and the concept moved across the United States like the rising sun. The courthouse in Los Angeles had just opened when I got home but the television news showed a dozen lawyers waiting outside to file paperwork against any corporation remotely related to the streaming industry or music-industry management.

The artists from Caliphate got into the act by suing their label as a group and individually for lost royalties. The same thing happened in Nashville and Los Angeles.

An hour after I had arrived back at the house, the biggest bombshells landed. More documents hit the Internet, these from a host of different labels but all with the same general theme – the major players were robbing not only the artists blind but also the public.

Half a dozen people came forward with information and asked for whistleblower protection in exchange for cooperation with the any criminal investigation – the clamor for which was growing in intensity in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals.

Liz was fielding calls from other performers from across the globe. Skye and Jill were working with Ryan, Dom, Brian, Bobbi and Dayton to take messages from the various people needing guidance as to what came next.

I was sitting on the couch, too stunned to do much of anything. Finally, I lurched to my feet and headed to the sound studio.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” The Professor said when he answered my frantic call. His voice was tinged with exasperation and disbelief. Mine was tinged with panic.

“What in the fuck happened?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he answered. “This is ... far beyond the scope of anything I imagined.”

“Well, no shit!” I replied.

“In the political arena, when the ship starts to list, the rats scurry for the lifeboats,” The Professor said. “Women and children be damned, they are going to save themselves. They certainly do not step forward and announce to the world that they are the ones responsible for the holes in the bottom.”

“Shit,” I mumbled. “What ... can I do anything?”

“The genie isn’t going back into the bottle,” The Professor told me.

“These people ... they have no idea what they’ve done,” I said. “They’ve ... everything is fucked!”

“There is that potential,” I was told.

“The whole system is going to implode on itself,” I continued. “I have managed to destroy the music industry.”

“Travis, step back for a minute,” The Professor advised. “Yes, the bigger corporations are going to take major hits. But think back to the lessons you’ve learned. The news is out and there are a lot of people with egg on their faces right now. What comes next?”

“The fallout,” I replied.

“And what will that be?” The Professor pressed.

I took a long breath and thought of what I’d learned in the past few months.

“The big boys will have enough capital to stay afloat,” I answered. “The smaller guys – the RFNs and the Caliphates of the world are going to be done ... maybe as early as next week.”

“I agree,” The Professor said. “We can probably sit here and put together a pretty accurate list of who will be standing by this time next week and next month and next year. But that really doesn’t matter. All that matters right now is that there will still be people standing.”

“True,” I admitted.

“What’s the next turn in the story?” The Professor urged.

“I wish I knew,” I replied.

“I think you know,” he told me. “Think it through. The bad guys have been identified. What’s left?”

“The good guys step forward,” I said.

“And that will happen,” he told me. “But you need to push them forward.”

I nodded my agreement although the man couldn’t see it.

“Thanks,” I said. “I ... I lost it there for a minute.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “You would have put this together on your own in time. But I do have a lifetime in crisis management so I had a head start. Call me if you need anything.”

“Will do,” I said.

I put down the phone and headed back into the hectic office.

“I need everyone to give me five minutes as soon as possible,” I announced.

I got a glance from everyone in the room but they all started to end their conversations or put away their tablets. In far shorter time than I’d expected, I had everyone’s attention.

“Let me get San Diego on the phone,” I said.

When I had Susan, Sarah and Rick on the line, I commenced with the plan.

“I think we all agree that this isn’t going away,” I said. “So we’re fully in PR mode now.”

“We’re not going to be able to spin our way out of this,” Liz stated.

“No,” I said. “We’re not. But we can manage it.”

“Geoff Granger stepped down at RFN a few minutes ago,” Jill informed me.

I was sorry to hear that. I thought that he was a decent guy in a bad business.

“It’s happening all over the place,” Rick cut in. “The shareholders are tossing the CEOs to the wolves.”

“They have to have a scapegoat to keep the profit checks coming in,” Sarah said.

“Look, there have to be some labels out there that didn’t play along,” I said. “We come out with a statement urging all the labels to open their books to the federal inspectors. I’m talking the folks with 20 acts and the people with four. The only way to restore trust with the public is complete transparency. No more hiding the CEO’s Lear jet through a shell company. Right now, our goal is to ensure that at least a few of the labels are still around in six months. We just have to determine which ones those will be.”

“It’s a little more than that,” Susan said. “It’s coming out that some of the artists are complicit. They got a bigger cut of the revenue to look the other way.”

I didn’t think that had happened at RFN but I looked at Liz just to make sure.

“How could you even think that?” she asked loudly. “I pulled my music from these places because of the inequity. It wasn’t about getting a big cut for me. It was about getting compensation for the little guys.”

“That’s our first salvo,” I declared. “And I didn’t think it. I was simply looking for confirmation of what I already thought. That’s all.”

“That’s always been her stance so there will be no backtracking,” Sarah said. “We just reiterate what’s already on the record. Then we push for the labels to come clean.”

“There is no use continuing to lie when you’ve already been caught,” Rick said.

I looked again to my employer (who, for the record, was still pissed at me on any number of levels).

“Is this OK?” I asked.

“Is it going to make a fuck’s worth of difference what we say now?” she asked.

“Maybe not,” Susan replied. “But it’s not going to hurt anything.”

“Right now, you have a lot of people looking for guidance,” Sarah added. “It’s not just the other artists. The public is looking for a voice it can still trust. That’s you. The media is looking for somebody that will step up and be somebody that will speak out about what’s going on. I think ... I think we step around Travis on this one. This statement has to come directly from you.”

I nodded my agreement, happy that somebody else had brought it up.

“I have no fucking idea how this got so out of control!” Liz raged.

“Nobody does,” Rick said. “I know you’re not familiar with the phenomenon but we have huge wildfires out here about every year. It starts with a bolt of lightning or some idiot tossing a cigarette out a window of his car. Then it burns everything in its path for the next three weeks before they can get it under control. This is just like that. It started innocently – a single spark. Then the winds took it and we’re looking at having half the homes between Los Angeles and San Diego gone. Yeah, we made a mistake at the beginning. The firebreak we dug turned out to be right over a gasoline storage tank. But the roots of this are longstanding and the causes are deep-rooted. You have dissatisfied consumers; unhappy performers and a general public that has grown weary of corporate greed. And here we are.”

Rick had kept his tones even and soft – a stark contrast to the angry tones that had come from the Nashville office where Liz sat.

“Here we are,” I said, trying my best to mimic Rick’s dulcet voice. “To continue the analogy, we can make one more effort to contain the fire or we can sit back and watch it burn. But it’s going to burn. We’re either going to help it burn itself out or it’s going to rage until there is nothing left in its path.”

Liz looked around the room for a moment before offering a grave nod.

“Travis, let the media know I’ll have a personal statement at ... three-thirty,” she said. “I want everybody there to have something ready for me by three o’clock. That’s 45 minutes. I’ll take a look at it and we’ll go from there. I want the rest of you to get in touch with Ben, Lucas, Conny, Melissa and Chelsea. Get them out here if they can make it. Send texts to everybody we know and let them know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. We’ll stand together or I suppose we’ll go down in flames together.”

“On it,” Susan said.

“On it,” Jill said.

“On it,” I echoed.

The vast majority of the Nashville media had never been through the gates of Liz’s palatial estate. I could see from the outset that most of them hoped a tour of the interior was in order – which it most certainly was not.

The flock of reporters descended on the grounds like vultures descend on road kill. The major networks had sent camera crews and their most popular on-air personalities. The newspapers, magazines and bloggers had come with digital cameras. A large section of the news channels were planning live coverage. This wasn’t the usual entertainment reporters. This story was hard news and brought out the big boys and girls.

Ryan had called in every member of the security team to keep order and to ensure everybody that arrived was a credentialed member of the fourth estate (and to ensure that everybody that arrived stayed where they were supposed to stay and didn’t wander around).

I had wanted to stay inside but Liz was adamant that I go out with her. Brea helped me get into a suit (without a tie again) while Liz and her group of friends got ready.

Exactly at 3:30 p.m., the group walked out of the front doors and took in the throng of reporters milling around on the lawn.

“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” Liz said into a microphone we had stolen from her sound stage and rigged to increase her volume. “The people up here with me and I have been involved in entertaining the public for a combined 50 years. I’ve spoken to people today from every facet of our business – including a man that’s been a musician for most of his 70 years on the planet. We all agree that the news we’ve heard today is disgusting ... but not surprising.

“As artists, we’ve long known that our endeavors are what kept the record labels in business. And, to be honest, we were fine with the concept. We understood that putting our music for sale helped to keep thousands of people employed and millions of music fans entertained. The people on stage have always had very limited control over most aspects of our livelihood. In that, we were no different than the people that have supported our careers. With very few exceptions, we went where we were told to go when we were told to go there. We collected whatever percentage of the proceeds that we’d managed to negotiate in our contracts – for most of us, that number was far smaller than the public thinks it was. It’s not a Nashville problem; it’s not a country music problem. It is industry wide and it spans all genres – as the distressing news today should make clear.”