Unheard-Of CD Security

When Linkin Park’s rock-rap stars locked down Studio A at North Hollywood’s NRG Recording Services for three months last year, they were looking for more than shelter from autograph hounds.

Keys to the studio were collected from everyone but NRG’s manager and an assistant engineer. Guards on rotating shifts logged the name of everyone who entered, including the chairman of the band’s record label. And instead of storing recordings on the studio’s high-security fiber-optic network, the band installed its own network with its own password.

The “Mission: Impossible”-level security surrounding the project is paying off for the band and AOL Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Records. Unlike many of the music industry’s major releases, the band’s second album, “Meteora,” didn’t leak to the Internet months before going on sale. The album, which has sold more than 800,000 copies since hitting shelves last week, will enter the national pop chart today at No. 1.

In scoring one of the year’s biggest debuts, the label is teaching the recording industry a lesson about the power of old-fashioned discipline in the digital era.

“You can’t be flippant or casual about this anymore,” said Warner Bros. Records Chairman Tom Whalley. “When you have the cooperation of the band and management, you can protect it, but it has to start from the time they hit the studio. This is the most extreme we’ve gotten, and it worked.”

While railing against piracy, record conglomerates have largely failed to prevent early leaks of releases to free Web sites -- and still don’t place technology on domestic CDs to prevent them from being copied after they are sold.

Only last week, British music giant EMI Group found itself racing to respond to the sudden appearance online of material from Radiohead, whose eagerly awaited album isn’t due in stores until June. And industry executives say the premature release online of rock band Korn’s “Untouchables” album contributed to its disappointing sales last year for Sony Corp.’s music division.

Such horror stories are slowly prodding a shift in the once-freewheeling internal culture of record companies, where advance copies of hot upcoming releases have long been traded back and forth among those in the know.

“There’s been a kind of traditional marketing routine,” said “Meteora” producer Don Gilmore. “People play things for other people. But something that might seem as innocent as trying to get someone excited about a new song by a big artist can cause the CD to fall into the wrong hands.”

Increasingly, artists and labels are strictly limiting access to raw recordings. Tight controls surrounded recent releases by such acts as Eminem and Jay-Z. Across the industry, many executives now share songs internally only via encrypted e-mail and “watermark” individual CDs with identification numbers so online leaks can be traced.

Warner executives say it wasn’t until the evening of March 18 -- a week before “Meteora” went on sale -- that they detected pirated songs from the album on an obscure corner of the Internet. That was remarkable, given the countless opportunities for a recording to stray, from the moment a band member hands a working copy to a friend to the day when millions of CDs begin rolling out of the pressing plant.

A Warner spokesperson said the label doesn’t know how “Meteora” leaked.

Industry horror stories helped prod Linkin Park to start its latest recording process by hiring a private security firm, which received a nod in the album’s liner notes. The Los Angeles-based group, with help from NRG manager Kelly Garver, then turned the studio interior into a bank vault. The rockers recorded their work onto computer hard drives, backed up on their private network and unmounted the drives from their bays at night to make tampering more difficult.

When the NRG work ended, “Meteora” existed on no more than two CDs and four hard drives. The band’s manager, Rob McDermott, kept them for a time in a security lockbox to which he had the only key.

Accompanied by a guard, he flew the material to New York, where similar protective measures surrounded a final three weeks of recording and mixing. Guards watched over the mixing studio around the clock. At the close of its sessions, the band routinely removed its hard drives from the room and turned them over to its security team for overnight safekeeping, said engineer John Ewing.

McDermott said his clients burned a handful of CDs to hear mixes of their work outside the confines of the studio but destroyed each copy within hours, sometimes using a microwave oven.

The final mixing process yielded about 16 reels of tape -- a medium still preferred to digital storage by many producers -- and copies on other media. McDermott returned with that material to Los Angeles one Saturday afternoon in December and drove directly from the airport to Warner Bros.’ Burbank offices.

There, under the watchful eyes of a guard, engineers disconnected a computer from the company’s internal network, then used the band’s material to make six copies of the album for Warner’s senior radio promotion executives so they could decide which song would first be pitched to rock programmers. The engineers then erased the songs from their computer.

Each of those six copies was watermarked and locked up with anti-copy software. Under instructions from Whalley, the promotion executives listened to the CD over a few days, then had to destroy their copies, place the pieces in an envelope and return them to Warner marketing executive Rochelle Staab, who was overseeing the security of the album.

Many labels now place some kind of protection software on early promotional copies of CDs given to press critics and radio programmers. But Warner Bros. decided to go one better in making “Meteora” leakproof: It didn’t send out any promotional discs. Reviewers had to visit the company’s offices, where security guards used metal-detection wands to check for recording devices. Radio stations received only the album’s first song via satellite transmission.

Even international promotion of “Meteora” didn’t involve the usual flood of finished CDs to the media and programmers. Instead, McDermott joined Warner Bros.’ international head Steve Margo and a security guard on a whirlwind tour from Singapore to London. They carried a single copy of the album, which they played for selected listeners, and their only “leave-behind” was a sampler with incomplete versions of five tracks of the album.

Meanwhile, the label’s domestic sales chief, Dave Stein, made similar stops at retailers in the U.S. By Warner’s count, only 10 copies of “Meteora” existed before the CD was sent to the label’s manufacturing plant in late February -- seven of them in the hands of the band. Warner placed restrictions on their sales operation as well, forbidding executives from making advance orders.

The massive lockdown all but stopped online leaks. Such prevention not only keeps chances alive for record store sales, executives say, but also holds the labels’ only real hope of driving consumers to purchase music from industry-approved Internet sites. So far, online services developed by the major record conglomerates have failed to crack the appeal of free file-sharing networks such as Kazaa.

“Maybe we’ll create better sites, and that’s great. But the truth of it is, we can’t make plans to sell music digitally if we can’t protect it from the time we go into the studio to the time it goes up for sale on our online services,” Whalley said.

The Warner executive noted that similar security around the production of Madonna’s new album kept her new single, “American Life,” under wraps until the day before it was to be delivered to fans who had ordered a digital copy online. The label had sold more than 4,100 digital copies of the song over the previous two weeks -- enough to debut at No. 4 on Billboard magazine’s singles chart.

For Linkin Park, the air of secrecy also may help restore something that manager McDermott said has been missing from many acts’ long-planned album releases: an element of surprise.

“How exciting is it when an album leaks six weeks earlier? You then get no excitement hearing the album the first time,” McDermott said.

“We’ve got to protect it to bring that experience back,” he added. “You’re talking about people’s livelihoods here.”