Shortly after the cease and desist letters were sent, the website Downhill Battle organized a massive campaign of civil disobedience. Downhill Battle was an influential non-profit in the mid-to-late-2000s whose mission was to “support participatory culture and build a fairer music industry.” Refusing to accept EMI’s attempts to limit access to Danger Mouse’s album, they worked in collaboration with 170 other websites to host the album for free download for one day. The involved sites also changed their banner design to a grey background as a display of solidarity. February 24th, 2004 would be known as Grey Tuesday. The online event was a massive success and the start of Danger Mouse’s meteoric rise to fame.

Grey Tuesday helped push the album’s popularity to its limit, but Downhill Battle co-founder Holmes Wilson is quick to point out that The Grey Album was already a critical darling before his website got involved. “It had been written up in The New Yorker already, it was going to be on some peoples’ best of the year lists for sure,” he says. “This was part of why we did the protest. We were asking ourselves, ‘How the hell could an album that’s a critical hit and getting written up in The New Yorker, of all places, be getting sued out of existence, and chased off the internet?’ It just seemed so backwards and sad that the musician who made this should be sitting there in fear of getting sued.”

While Wilson is correct in acknowledging that The Grey Album would have made an impact without Grey Tuesday, the increased reach after the protest is undeniable. In a 2004 interview with Z-Trip, Wilson and Downhill Battle co-founder Nicholas Reville revealed that the album was downloaded 100,000 times on Grey Tuesday, which was a huge feat in the early days of digital music. In another post, Wilson and Reville shared some fascinating results from their file sharing analysis. Users had downloaded Danger Mouse more on Grey Tuesday than Kanye West and Norah Jones. Danger Mouse had gone from a producer with some minor buzz to a household name with over one million of his tracks downloaded in one day. He had outperformed two of the most bankable names in music (for one day, at least).

In addition to helping Danger Mouse reach levels of popularity that had seemed impossible without a major label or publicist behind him, The Grey Album and Grey Tuesday shined a very bright light on the murky sampling laws that prevent many independent musicians from making licensed remix and mashup albums. In an interview with MTV a short time after Grey Tuesday, Reville said, “Musicians that build a collage are treated like criminals. We need to find a way to change that to make sampling practical.” EMI was unmoved by this sentiment at the time and felt that Danger Mouse had avoided using the appropriate procedure for sampling their work. “There is a well-established market for licensing samples and remixes,” an EMI spokesperson said. “In this case, the DJ did not ask us permission and never attempted to use established channels.”

Indeed there were established channels for clearing samples in 2004, yet legal sampling can be complicated, expensive, and often cost-prohibitive. For a little-known artist like Danger Mouse to go through the proper channels and clear every sample on The Grey Album would have required a budget well beyond his scope, a fact EMI would have been aware of. To give some context, AMC’s Mad Men made headlines in 2012 for paying $250,000 to license a single Beatles song.

There may have been other factors that made Danger Mouse cautious about going through official channels with his album. There is a long and well-documented history of rock musicians and their record labels not having a favorable view towards sample-based music. As Turtles founder Mark Volman once said after settling out-of-court after a sample dispute with De La Soul, “Sampling is just a longer term for theft. Anybody who can honestly say sampling is some sort of creativity has never done anything creative.”

The fierce debate over The Grey Album’s right to exist exposed another problem with sampling laws: labels sometimes ignored their artist’s opinions towards having their work sampled. Subsequent interviews with Paul McCartney revealed that The Beatles camp had little interest in raising a stink over The Grey Album. When asked about his feelings towards the project, McCartney told BBC Radio 1, “I didn’t mind when something like that happened with The Grey Album. But the record company minded. They put up a fuss. But it was like, ‘Take it easy guys, it’s a tribute.’”

Jay Z echoed a similar sentiment while speaking to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. “I think it was a really strong album,” Jay said. “I champion any form of creativity, and that was a genius idea.” Roc-A-Fella backed up this sentiment and neglected to take any legal action action against Danger Mouse. While it is nice to see the appreciation both artists had for Danger Mouse’s effort, if all artists being sampled approve of a mashup or other work of sample-based music, shouldn’t the label consider their opinion before sending out a cease and desist?

Jay-Z in 2003

Grey Tuesday and the resulting media attention helped Danger Mouse’s project reach the far corners of the internet, but he seemed to have mixed feelings about Downhill Battle’s efforts when reflecting on their protest a few years later. “I realized it was probably more about what they were doing than what I did,” he said. “It was just hoping that it had the right effect when it was done. I still didn’t know how I felt about the whole thing. But I figured I wasn’t going to say anything one way or another.”