Today, I’m talking with Mitch Glazier, who is CEO and chairman of 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 villain for suing kids for downloading music. That was 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. 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 the big AI companies in the same way, for training on everyone’s work without permission and flooding our feeds with slop.
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Everyone is 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 the legal complexity of things like AI deepfakes, how banning them 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 want to get right into it. This conversation is a real ride through how AI, the law, art, and commerce might all intersect. I think you’re going to be able to tell, Mitch and I had a lot of fun talking about it.
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Okay: RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mitch Glazier, you’re the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, which people know as the RIAA. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you. Thank you, Nilay. I’m excited to be here.
I am very excited to talk to you. I have to tell you, this is a very full-circle moment for me. My entire career got on track when I was in college. Napster came out, my university banned Napster from the school network, and I decided right then I was going to 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 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.
Good. Well then, I’m no longer sorry for the policies that we forced your school to implement because it made you a copyright lawyer. So the world benefited at the end of the day. It had some silver linings to it.
When I first started at the RIAA, Napster was obviously 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, a much more gradual change and much less abrupt. So they decided it’d be a good idea, since I was youngish at the time, to make me go to college campuses, go to auditoriums, and convince these college students that they shouldn’t use peer-to-peer technology.
Wait, wait, wait. I imagine when you said that, it was more like a 21 Jump Street situation, where you were posing in the dining hall being like, “We should pay for it.” Were you giving presentations?
Yes, it was horrible. Everybody had these anti-RIAA t-shirts on. I remember one time I followed Chuck D, who was there promoting peer-to-peer. And I didn’t know what to do, and I knew I was going to get booed. So I took a garbage bag, put it over my head, and I walked out onto the stage, thinking they were going to throw tomatoes at me; I might as well 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 the change in technologies, things being fan-driven, and the disconnect that can occur sometimes between an industry and the people who are out there driving change in the industry. So it was actually a good experience in the end, but it certainly did not feel like it at the time.
It didn’t feel like it at the time for me. Thank you for saying the butterfly effect is real. But it was heated. It was hot.
One of the things that has really occurred to me as I get older, and AI exists, and I see the platforms taking so much of the economic value out of art, is that my opinions about intellectual property enforcement 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… There was that meme ages ago: everything is a remix, and 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. 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 that 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 this: 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. And 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 more than 20 years. How are you feeling about that balance?
Yeah, so the word balance is the right one, and it’s not an easy one. It’s one of those things where, over time, a barrier pops up here and then you kind of pivot, and then a barrier pops up here and you kind of pivot, and you sort of land in a zone that feels right because the responses that you’re getting, both from the creative community and from fans, start to line up. And I think in AI, they are lining up much more closely than they did during previous years of disruption.
Some of it has been because of the democratization of the industry, where the gatekeeping roles have changed, where the partnerships between those who partner and invest with artists and the artists themselves have changed. In a world where artists and label services, like à la carte services, are a bigger part of revenue, in an area where catalog, forever exploitation, and new investors in the industry have come in, the landscape is much wider now. And it’s not like there are just two types of big actors controlling or sharing in all of the money.
Now there are dozens of different types of folks meeting artists in different places where they are and meeting fans in different places where they are. And so it feels to me like this disruption, which is huge, and I hope we talk about it… The good news is, unlike Napster, I don’t feel like we are facing it at odds, which is kind of what it felt like back then. Now it feels like we’re not in the same place, but we’re kind of rowing in the same general direction, which is that everybody understands that art and commerce have always had tension, and there’s always going to have to be a balance. But authenticity and that connection between a human being artist and a fan, the preservation of that seems to be paramount in everything that we’re doing, whether you’re investing, listening, or performing.
And to me, we’re not fighting in this space anymore between just a business model or an investment. We are now fighting to keep the art as human and the connection between an artist and a fan preserved and alive. And that to me just seems like a much larger purpose, I guess. So it feels very different to me. It feels like a good bookend.
Like you, I started my career with Napster, but I was on the other side, learned a ton as a young lawyer, and now on the other side, we have AI, and comparing the two is so wild. I mean, the polls during Napster were like fans over here, and creators kind of hiding a little bit, and the companies over here. And now it’s like AI’s over here, and we’re all together on the other side.
Yeah. I mean, again, I cannot emphasize this enough: I was a bad lawyer, and I should not have been doing that job.
[Laughs] I doubt that.
I was not good at it. I really wasn’t. And what I remember from that time was that it was college kids; their universities would turn over their IP addresses, and they would get their little lawsuit. We would tell them, “We’re going to go to the district court in Chicago; you’re going to settle for $5,000, because that’s what the RIAA is running this program at. It’s a $5,000 settlement to break even on the cost and to deter you, and then you’re going to go work at the pizza place for a semester, pay your bill, and move on.” And I thought, this can’t be accomplishing a goal. The thing I’m doing right now is nothing. And maybe that’s why I felt like I was a horrible lawyer. Maybe that’s why I got out of it. But what you’re describing is the poles there, where there was no pushback on, well, these kids just love music. The thing they love is just music, and now they can get it, and they have it. They weren’t thinking about the business model of CDs.
That’s what Napster fundamentally disrupted. There was a scarce physical object that you could go pay $15 for, and if Metallica sold enough of those, their plane would get bigger, and everyone could kind of see that. And, “I’m listening to a lot of this music, and it should make you rich,” was nowhere close to reality. We’ve built those models now. We have built Spotify and Apple Music and all the subscription models. I want to talk about YouTube quite a bit, actually, where you can listen to a lot of music and some people will get rich, but a middle class of artists may just be totally hollowed out. And now the AI companies are like, “And we’re going to set up a competitor where you can just ask for music and no one except us will get paid.” And that is probably built on a bunch of artists that used to make money by having a lot of attention.
That swirl for me is the one that I can’t decide where my ideals fit into. As a person who has opened Suno and had a good time just making some music, I’m like, well, I understand how this is great for one kind of person with an artistic bent. I understand why this is fun, as somebody who likes music. I do not understand the economics that follow from this, the same way I had no idea how the economics of disrupting the CD would shake out. I’ll actually give you one example just to make this question even longer. We had the CEO of Cloudflare on the show, and they’re trying to set up a system where, instead of websites running advertising on traffic, everyone gets paid a fraction of a cent to make content on the web, like Spotify.