Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:00:00 · S0, S1, S2
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00:01:11 · Nilay Patel
[00:01:11] S3: Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief The Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other props. Today I'm talking with Mitch Glazier, the CEO and chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America or the RIAA. This conversation was a real full circle moment for me. I was in college when Napster hit and the RIAA became everyone's favorite villain because they were suing kids for downloading music. That is when I decided to go be a copyright lawyer which set the rest of my career in motion. And Mitch was in the background as a young lawyer at the RIAA working on those cases on the other side. So part of me was very deeply, very genuinely surprised to discover just how much fun I had talking to Mitch. That's because here in 2026, Mitch, the RIAA, the record labels, the artists, and ordinary people are all pretty unhappy with big AI companies in the same way for training on everyone's work without permission and flooding our feeds with slop. Everyone's mad about it and since the RIAA is both the group that lobbies for changes to the law and also the group that files lawsuits about things that affect record labels and distributors, Mitch is a pretty busy guy these days. We got deep into legal complexity of things like AI deepfakes. How bending them outright might affect other kinds of expression and how the AI detection and labeling systems that we all seem to want might actually work in practice. Especially if big platforms like Spotify and YouTube don't get on board. I just wanna get right into it. This conversation is a real ride through how AI and the law and art and commerce might all intersect. I you're gonna be able to tell that Mitch and I had a lot of fun talking about it. Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay. RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier. Here we go. Mitch Glazier, you're the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, which people know as the RIAA. Welcome to Decoder.
00:02:52 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
[00:02:52] S4: Thank you. Thank you, Nilay. I'm excited to be here. [00:02:54] S3: I'm very excited to talk to you. I I have to tell you this is a very full circle moment for me. My entire career got onto its track when I was in college and Napster came out and my university banned Napster from the school network and I decided right then I was going go be a copyright lawyer and then I was a copyright lawyer and I defended kids who got sued for using Kazaa. I was not good at I was not good at that job. It was not fulfilling. And I became a journalist because I could write about copyright law on the iPod. So talking to you is about as full circle as it gets for me. Thank you for being on the show. [00:03:27] S4: Good. Well then I'm I'm no longer sorry for the policies that we forced your your school to implement because it made you a copyright lawyer. So the world benefited at the end of the day. So it it had some it had some silver had some silver linings to it. When I first started the RIAA, you know, Napster was obviously the the big issue. Nobody had seen anything like it before. The last technological change had really been CDs. I mean, it had been a long time and a much more gradual change and much less abrupt. So they decided it'd be a good idea since I was like you know youngish at the time to make me go to college campuses and go to like you know auditoriums and convince these college students that they shouldn't use use peer to peer technology.
00:03:27 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel, Nilay Patel
[00:03:27] S4: Good. Well then I'm I'm no longer sorry for the policies that we forced your your school to implement because it made you a copyright lawyer. So the world benefited at the end of the day. So it it had some it had some silver had some silver linings to it. When I first started the RIAA, you know, Napster was obviously the the big issue. Nobody had seen anything like it before. The last technological change had really been CDs. I mean, it had been a long time and a much more gradual change and much less abrupt. So they decided it'd be a good idea since I was like you know youngish at the time to make me go to college campuses and go to like you know auditoriums and convince these college students that they shouldn't use use peer to peer technology. [00:04:15] S3: Wait, wait, wait. I imagine when you said that that it was more like a 21 Jump Street situation that you were [00:04:20] S4: like Right. I was like, in the dining hall. [00:04:22] S5: I'll be like, we should pay [00:04:23] S3: for credit. You had... You were giving like, you were like giving presentations?
00:04:23 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[00:04:23] S3: for credit. You had... You were giving like, you were like giving presentations? [00:04:26] S4: Yes. It was horrible. So, you know, everybody had like these anti RIAA t shirts on and I remember one time I... They... I followed Chuck D who was like on there promoting peer to peer. And I didn't know what to do and I knew I was gonna get booed. So I took a garbage bag and I just like put it over my head and I walked out onto the stage with a garbage bag on me, you know, thinking if they're going to throw tomatoes at me I might as well just sort of make light of it. But I have to say even though it was a very tough time some of the conversations that we had with students at that time were some of the best conversations I've ever had, even now with AI, about sort of the change in technologies, things being fan driven, you know, the disconnect that can occur sometimes between, you know, an industry and the the people who, you know, are out there driving change in the industry. So it it was actually a good experience in the end, but it certainly did not feel like it at the time.
00:05:32 · Nilay Patel
[00:05:32] S3: It didn't feel like it at the time for me. Thank you for saying the butterfly effect is real, but it was it was heated. It was hot. And one of the things that has really occurred to me is I get older and AI exists and I see the platforms taking so much of the economic value out of art, particularly in the age of AI, is that my opinions about intellectual property enforcement have have changed. It feels like I'm just giving up all of the ideals that I had when I was a kid about the internet. That open access to information was good that you know, there was that meme ages ago, everything is a remix and that we should all build on each other's art as much as we want because that will push the culture forward. I am still very idealistic about that. I I... And I and I definitely did not think the recording industry suing kids was the appropriate way to protect the intellectual property of artists back then. But here we are in the age of AI and it feels like no one is making enough money for making art except the world's biggest artists who are all also tech investors now in some way and the tech platforms who collect fractions of pennies from everything and are doing data center build outs or whatever it is. And that just existential dynamic for me is where I wanted to start. I want to talk about how the RIAA works and all the decoder questions but I was just thinking about what I really wanted to ask you and it comes down to that is we have to protect the work but there's some balance in overprotecting the work that makes it harder for people to make new things. In my own journey with the RIAA is a reconsideration of that as more and more things get taken. Where have you landed? You've been there for twenty years. How are you feeling about that balance?