New RIAA Chief Seeks a Hit Single
By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, September 5, 2003; 9:00 AM

Mitch Bainwol stops talking and a puzzled look settles over his face. He's sitting at the Daily Grill on 18th and M streets in the heart of Washington, D.C., and something is not right.

He reaches for his Blackberry handheld messaging device, stares at the screen and says in a quiet, almost perplexed tone, I haven't gotten any messages for an hour.

For Bainwol -- an influential lobbyist and former Republican congressional aide -- this is unusual. As the new head of one of the most controversial and powerful industry associations in town, he is a man in demand.

Bainwol, 44, was largely unknown outside the Beltway until last month when he accepted the top job at the Recording Industry Association of America.

But all that's about to change, as he prepares to lead the recording industry's campaign against the millions of people who illegally download and trade songs on the Internet.

Congressional staffers and the K Street lobbying community say that Bainwol is the natural choice to represent the world's biggest record labels in their race to stop Internet music piracy.

He's bright, he's tough and his word is golden, said Greg Farmer, a senior vice president at Nortel Networks and at one time Bainwol's rival on the campaign trail.

It's Hip to Be Square


Music is not Mitch Bainwol's passion, and he's never used a file-sharing service like Napster or Kazaa. NCAA college basketball is where this Georgetown graduate's extracurricular interests lie.

Of medium height with short dark hair, the standard-issue white shirt and suit pants, Bainwol, looks like the part of a D.C. lobbyist. One Democratic operative described him -- apart from his ever-present Blackberry -- as the world's least hip-seeming guy.

Hipness is not part of the RIAA job requirement, even if he's the new Washington voice of the music world's hottest acts. Representing the interests of the nation's largest recording companies -- and to a certain extent their stable of artists -- with unparalleled zeal is the primary mission. And, as his predecessor Hilary Rosen demonstrated in her seven-year tenure, a take-no-prisoners policy is the necessary modus operandi.

In interviews with numerous sources for this profile, a collective picture emerges of Bainwol as someone who has the rare combination of steely-eyed resolve, uncanny intelligence, a friendly attitude, the ability to tell it like it is and the tact required to achieve compromise when necessary.

Bainwol has the ability to manage an organization. His intellect allows him to fully appreciate all the nuances of issues, said Connie Mack, the former Florida senator who was Bainwol's boss for 12 years. He has an incredible ability to grasp in a very short period of time the essence of a debate.

Mack learned to appreciate this quality almost two decades ago when Bainwol managed his first Senate race -- the first time the up-and-coming Hill staffer had ever managed a campaign of any sort. Bainwol helped Mack to victory against former Rep. Buddy McKay (D-Fla.) in what became the closest Senate contest in Florida history.

We went through some very intense times and at the end of it I had nothing but good things to say about him and Connie, said Farmer, the Nortel vice president, and McKay's campaign manager in the '88 race.

Farmer isn't the only Democrat to heap praise on Bainwol.

He's a pretty affable guy despite his partisan background and bare-knuckles style in a political fight, said Jim Jordan, campaign director for presidential candidate John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Jordan ran the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the 2002 election season while Bainwol worked as his opposite number in the Republican camp.

We found it was helpful to have lines of communication open, said Jordan, adding that they would meet occasionally over beers to talk through various issues in their respective campaigns. He'll get things done, but with a minimum of bloodshed.

Then there's the human touch that any tough political operative needs to not just be respected, but liked.

Mitch is the only person I know in Washington who returns every single call he gets, said Laura Dove, a Republican Hill staffer who has worked in various capacities with Bainwol for about seven years. Ninety-nine percent of the time he does it the same day. He genuinely wants to help people.

Bainwol's entire career in the political world started with a helping hand. After enrolling at Georgetown University in 1977, he was looking for something to do in D.C. besides studying. He took an acquaintance's recommendation to make a cold call on Rep. Robin Beard (R-Tenn.).

My secretary called and said there's this young man from Georgetown that wants to come here and work as an intern, so I said, 'Who is he?' They said, 'We don't know. Nobody sent him. Nobody's recommended him. He just said he wants to work in Robin Beard's office,' Beard said in an interview. I said I have no money in the budget. He said, 'I'll do it for free.'

Aside from earning his MBA at Rice in 1983, Bainwol has been a political animal ever since.

When he wasn't working in the Senate or at the Republican National Committee, Bainwol spent two years representing corporate technology, defense and healthcare giants like Microsoft Corp., Lockheed Martin and Schering-Plough at the D.C. lobbying firm Clark & Weinstock.

It was his work at the National Republican Senatorial Committee that earned him the admiration of Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), the committee's chairman at the time. There he established more than ever his ability to respond to the demands of many different and occasionally competing interests.

Mitch was a critical part of my campaign, said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who ran against Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) before Wellstone died in a plane crash weeks before Election Day. Mitch was in many ways kind of my rabbi or teacher.

World War Music


The RIAA's chief concern these days isn't its public image, which is fairly dismal among Internet users and privacy rights advocates. The group long ago stopped playing nice and adopted a no-holds-barred philosophy in its race to defeat the online pirates who it claims are robbing music companies of sales.

There are more than 57 million Americans swapping digital music files on the Internet, according to the Boston-based Yankee Group research firm. The RIAA estimates that its biggest members -- Universal Music Group, Warner Bros. Music, BMG Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment and the EMI Group -- are losing up to 10 percent of their annual revenue as a direct result of online piracy.

Forrester research analyst Josh Bernoff said in a report this week that the industry lost $700 million to file sharing in 2002. More importantly for the RIAA, Bernoff found that of the 20 percent of Americans who use file-sharing services, half bought fewer CDs after they began downloading pirated songs.

The record companies spin a standard mantra: stealing is stealing, whether it's done in the spirit of Robin Hood or Al Capone. Recording artists and the companies that back them, they say, deserve to profit from their work, just like any other business.

The RIAA's chief weapon to date has been the subpoena, which the group uses to force Internet service providers to cough up the names of suspected music pirates. The group sent out more than 1,600 of them this summer, and the first lawsuits are just around the corner, an RIAA official said. Some of the subpoena targets are inveterate practitioners of copyright infringement, while others are hapless teenagers whose even more hapless technophobe parents had no idea what their kids were doing online.

Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge take issue with the group's legal tactics. Many disaffected music buyers further complain about what they see as the over-inflated cost of buying music and an industry that, until recently, refused to embrace the Internet as a distribution medium.

Into this conflict steps Bainwol, who after stepping down from his position earlier this year as chief of staff for Frist -- now the Senate majority leader -- was ready to work hard but in somewhat more comfortable circumstances.

Why would he want to step into this minefield? It's not the money. The chief executive slot at the RIAA pays well -- some sources say around $1 million a year -- but Bainwol likely could have gotten more compensation for less work if he had continued consulting for big-time clients like Freddie Mac at his lobbying shop, the Bainwol Group.

I'm really drawn by the challenge, he said. It stretches the imagination, dealing with issues that are broad and have a societal impact.

Bainwol will take the RIAA helm from Hilary Rosen, whose name was, to say the least, vilified across the Internet because of her hard-hitting tactics against file sharing.

Will the RIAA under Bainwol take a kinder, gentler approach? Not likely, said Rosen.

I think if they were looking to soften their image, they would be taking a different tack right now, Rosen said of her replacement.

A Blank Slate, for Now


Dinner at the Daily Grill was supposed to be an occasion to get Bainwol to talk a little bit about himself, but that's one thing he doesn't like to do.

And he's not ready to talk in detail about what the RIAA's next concrete steps will be in the file-trading controversy.

RIAA chief lobbyist Mitch Glazier and Bainwol made introductory visits on the Hill, but Bainwol is reluctant to talk too much about what the RIAA's solution will be to reconciling the music business and the Internet.

The way I approach issues is to listen, read, talk to folks and get a broad range of thoughts, and understand them, hopefully at a level that extends beyond the superficial, he said. Then you form conclusions. You have instincts, but you test them.

There is one thing he can safely say at this time -- illegal file trading is plain wrong, but he is aware that it will take more than subpoenas and lawsuits to change the perception of a generation of adolescents and children for whom it's a part of their lives.

People do intuitively understand that you just don't walk into a store and take something, he said. But Bainwol acknowledged that there's a generation of 15-year-olds out there who don't see it that way when it comes to the tantalizing variety of music available for free, easy and illegal downloading.

That availability is what justifies the RIAA's tough legal action. They've done the right thing, he said. It comes on the heels of lots of other efforts. There has to be a real change in understanding.

RIAA President Cary Sherman acknowledged that changing the Internet generation's perception that music should be free isn't going to come through a raft of new legislation, though having Bainwol on board will certainly help the group get what it wants from Congress.

Wayne Rosso, president of the Grokster file-sharing service, said that Bainwol can only be as effective as his constituents will allow him to be... I just hope he brings some sanity to the situation.

But it's hard to get even the voluble, mercurial Rosso to say a discouraging word about Bainwol.

Our guys in Washington say good things about him. I think we're no better or no worse off than we were with Hilary Rosen, he said.

He's a bit of an unknown quantity, said Fred Von Lohmann, senior attorney with the EFF. I think the opening months of this tenure are going to be defined by an issue that at least he himself was not pivotal in selecting. It's certainly a big challenge for anyone.

Will Bainwol find the ultimate solution to square the Internet with the recording industry? That remains a big question. If he's had any sudden flashes of inspiration, he's not saying anything ... yet.

One notable twist in his Capitol Hill relationships shows that even if he ends up butting heads with some of the RIAA's critics, they still want to accommodate him.

Case in point: Norm Coleman, who said Bainwol was such a big help to his 2002 campaign, now is the chief Senate critic of the RIAA's legal tactics against file traders. He's not sweating this disconnect with their otherwise affable relationship, though.

I talked to Mitch about that, Coleman said. Sometimes you have to tell your friends you're doing the wrong thing ... I have no problem telling Mitch, 'Hey, I have a concern about the path that they're on.'

Coleman is quick to add, If a guy can say he loves somebody, I love this guy!


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