Ripping 10,000 CDs is a Herculean task in and of itself, but add the need to accurately enter all of the data from each album into a database—song names, year, artist names, etc.—and things start to get ridiculous. It comes out to around fifty CDs per person if everyone in our 200-person company contributed, but that assumes doing each CD only once and not having any data verification, which of course we wanted, so that put us up to over 100 CDs per person, if everyone contributes. But contribute they did. Michael announced during a Chairman's Chat one Friday that we needed everyone's help in getting this done, and lo and behold, I'm fairly certain that every employee took part: taking shifts to come down to the makeshift ripping area, using it as a break from their daily grind, and taking CDs back to their desk to work on them during downtime throughout the day. Even Michael took part in the process, although Robin Richards was out of town at the time and did not.

Over the next two weeks or so we slowly chewed through the CDs the company had purchased either from stores or from employees. It was a pretty tremendous sight to behold, and even more so it was a team-building process as you watched the office admin next to the VP of sales, the tiny on-staff masseuse, Linda, next to Paradise, one of the head musicologists as well as a founding father of hip hop. People were getting excited, and, while there was still grumbling about the legality of our situation, we were starting to get back some of the cohesiveness which we had lost as we grew from 60 or 70 people six months prior to the almost 200 that we were at now.

There's only one thing that I'm not sure anyone understood at the time: we weren't ripping 10,000 CDs.

When Robin returned, he was in for a shock: 40,000+ CDs had been ripped onto a number of file servers, just waiting to be "unlocked" by users who owned those very CDs as soon as the My.MP3.com service went live. I'm actually not sure how or when this was discovered: did Robin get back and just see people ripping away, but assumed they were working on the 10,000 he had specified, realizing only when they had finished that the full 40,000 we had acquired had been ripped? Did the engineers realize that there was a hard limit of 10,000, or did they think 10,000 was merely the goal, and since people were still ripping, they might as well go through them all? Did Michael tell people to just rip them all, fully aware that there were more than 10,000 there?

I'm sure someone knows, but by that time it didn't matter: when My.MP3.com went live, roughly 40,000 CDs had been ripped, four times as many as had been specified, with a potential fine four times as high, and enough to put us out of business. Unless we wanted to delete all of those albums—and we'd probably have to just delete them all and start from scratch, losing weeks of productivity—the stakes of the game had just gotten a whole lot higher. But we were oblivious. We were changing the world and fighting against the evil corporate music industry. Da Bomb represented the future of music and the major labels were merely unwilling to cede control. It was up to us to bring music into the 21st century, and we were going to do it in a legal way: merely allowing users to space-shift content they "owned." So what did we do? We kept ripping.