“You guys are clowns,” Daren recalled another executive basically
saying. “We don’t want to deal with you.”
Talks with Universal also came to a dead end. A former Universal
Music Group executive told me, “They [Samsung] blew it.”
But what if Samsung didn’t need Hollywood labels? T.J. and Daren
asked themselves. What if the company could use its weight as a
smartphone manufacturer to bypass grumpy gatekeepers like Sony and
Universal? What if it could use its technology to woo the artists themselves,
who were frustrated with the big four record companies?