There he was on Twitter, expressing opinions on video games and criminal cases and replying to Lorde. There he was at his Coatesville mansion, partying with fans and journalists who received secret passwords through direct messages over social media. There he was in the news, being covered by section editors for business, politics, court and the gossip pages – especially after his divorce from wife Mona Dotcom, a split he claimed left him “broke, destitute and penniless”.

In 2014, Kim Dotcom was everything, everywhere, all at once, about as ubiquitous as any public figure based in Aotearoa has ever been. “He was in the news all of the time,” says former NZ Herald journalist Hayden Donnell. “He was a big Twitter guy, and he was a huge news guy. It seems strange: he’s a fringe guy now. Back then … he was a big deal. If you go back to the homepages of websites around that time, it’s Kim Dotcom, always.”

It’s true. In the midst of all of that coverage – the Coatesville mansion parties, the court cases, the Twitter beefs, the high-profile divorce, the political scandals, the launch and demise of the Internet Party, the raids on his home, the jet skis, the jet black outfits, the bright pink Cadillacs, that Vice documentary, the numberplate that said “God”, and that time he completely slaughtered me at Call of Duty – the Megaupload founder decided to do something he’d never done before.

Kim Dotcom made an album.

‘It’s got all the depth of a puddle’

Hayden Donnell is laughing so hard he nearly falls off his chair. He snorts, then runs off to pee. When he returns, he admits he’s been reading his own story on his phone in the toilet. “I can’t believe … that I was stupid enough to do it,” he says. These days, Donnell is a familiar voice from RNZ’s Mediawatch show and a regular contributor to The Spinoff. But back in 2014 he was a newly unemployed journalist attempting to scrape together a career and a living as a freelancer. “It seems like a big risk in retrospect. I guess I didn’t have much to lose at that point.”

In January of that year, Kim Dotcom released his album. Called Good Times, it was a mess, a 17-track album of generic Eurotrash beats and lame choruses. The songs were so out-of-step with anything going on in the current musical climate there was only one option for anyone tasked with reviewing it: complete and utter ridicule. “It’s going to be bad. Of course it’s going to be bad,” I wrote in my one-star review at the time. “What really surprises is just how awful Kim Dotcom’s Good Times really is.”

Dotcom’s album, agrees Donnell, became “a punchline”. “It’s got all the depth of a puddle,” he says. It’s true. On the song ‘Good Life’, Dotcom simply listed his favourite things: “Super yachts, fast cars, speed boats, caviar, private planes, helicopter, so insane.” On ‘Dance Dance Dance’, he creepily groans, “Hands in the air / Hands everywhere.” And on ‘Take Me Away,’ Dotcom gets his ex-wife to croon the hook. “Take me away / As fast as you can,” she sings, with seemingly little irony.

Donnell compares it to the kind of musical slop AI churns out these days. “There’s a deeply inhuman element to it,” he says. “It’s money thrown at a wall because Kim Dotcom wanted to be a musician. There’s nothing he really wants to say besides, ‘I’m wealthy and I wanna be a DJ.’”

Donnell thought there might be more to the “utterly sexless” album than a collection of pathetic dance songs. He’d received a tip, from The Spinoff founder Duncan Greive, who suggested many local musicians were involved in its creation, that the recording sessions were fraught, and that they might all be keen to talk. Greive suggested Donnell was the right person to start digging. “I really did launch into it with some vigour,” says Donnell. “Once I started I was surprised by how many of the people involved were willing to talk to me.”

Almost everyone talked: the owner of Roundhead Studios Neil Finn, late guitar legend Aaron Tokona, Kora’s Laughton Kora, and Loop record label owner Mikee Tucker. They spilled intimate details about the conditions the album was made in, the recording sessions that yielded dozens of songs all cut by Dotcom, and, crucially, what it was like being involved in Dotcom’s day-to-day orbit. Sometimes, it was savage. “We were fucked. We were so tired. And he came in and he went off at us like: ‘Why do I pay you?’” remembers one contributor to the album.

What Donnell uncovers remains among the finest pieces of music journalism produced in Aotearoa: allegations of tennis ball branding, of rampant racism including “racist days”, dwarf strippers and golliwog dolls, of aimless all-night recording sessions that would turn on a dime depending on Dotcom’s mood swings, and of a group of conflicted local musicians who were finally earning decent money yet making music they loathed.

Dotcom pulled everyone together, including Tiki Taane, the Grammy Award-winning Black Eyed Peas collaborator Printz Board, and Roc Nation producer Deryk ‘Sleep Deez’ Mitchell, to make his album, on his schedule, with his money. According to court documents, he spent $1 million making it happen, an amount almost certainly more than any other record made in this country before – or since. “It reeks of obliviousness and out-of-touch wealth that allows someone to never come in contact with reality,” says Donnell.

His piece soon became about something more than the making of a truly terrible album. “In many ways, it’s about the isolating power of wealth,” he says. Donnell drilled into the stark differences between the local musicians being paid more money than they’d ever seen, and the incessant wants and needs of their demanding new boss. “It’s this collision of different lives, different levels of power, resourcing, and the kind of obliviousness that gave Kim Dotcom license to treat people in a way that you wouldn’t get away with if you weren’t in his position.”

Finally, at the end of 2014, after many interviews, an ultra-careful writing process, multiple rounds of edits, and lengthy discussions with Greive about just how far they could push the story, Donnell’s piece was ready to be published. Despite refusing his multiple interview requests, Dotcom would soon have something to say about it.

‘Lorde tweeting about it was a pretty big deal’

It landed not with a bang – but with a whimper. At the beginning of 2015, Sonic Doom: The Madness and Mayhem of Making Good Times ran in 1972, a now-defunct in-house magazine published by the men’s fashion outlet Barkers being edited by Greive. Unlike today’s digital-first newsrooms, the story wasn’t available online. “People buying a suit jacket might read an intricately researched story on the making of Kim Dotcom’s album,” laughs Donnell about the strangeness of that situation.

He pushed for his story to be published online. In April, 2015, that happened when it was syndicated on the online publication The Pantograph Punch. That, says Donnell, is when it started gaining traction. “It did kick off,” he says. One day, he woke to notifications from Lorde who had been tweeting about it. Dotcom replied. That tweet no longer exists, but Donnell remembers Lorde saying something like, “This is fucked up,” and Dotcom replying, “Don’t believe everything you read or hear.” To date, it’s the only time Dotcom has interacted with Donnell about his story.

Greive remains proud of his role in the piece, and says lawyers were heavily involved over defamation fears. He persisted, feeling it was an important topic to cover because of Dotcom’s Megaupload legacy. “It was particularly fascinating because of the immense (and profoundly negative, in my view) impact he’d had on the music industry through Megaupload,” Greive told me. “The irony of him recycling that wealth into a tawdry vanity album remains extraordinary. It required someone with Hayden’s skill and persistence to build it out.”

It paid off. Donnell ended up winning a Voyager (now Canon) Media Award for the story, taking out the title of best arts and entertainment feature writer in 2016. It was, he says, his first proper feature, and it’s a high he’s been chasing ever since. Among all of his work, from trying to get things into Te Papa and deciphering whether a cafe full of people applauded Amanda Palmer, to his incisive coverage of traffic jams and housing problems in Auckland, Donnell ranks his Kim Dotcom investigation among his best work, second only to a successful hunt for the creator of the Kiwi onion dip.

The giant back-of-the-bus ads for the album have disappeared, and Dotcom has faded from the public eye, but Good Times is still available on streaming services. Spotify reports Dotcom receives 6,000 monthly listens, those tuning in finding one of the last remaining remnants of the time an internet mogul attempted to make an album using as many of Aotearoa’s finest musical resources as he could lure with his vast fortune.

Despite writing the definitive story on the subject, Donnell remains as perplexed by it now as he was back then. Constraints, he says, can help inform great art. “If there’s no structure because the resources are infinite and time is boundless, there’s no urgency there, and no coherent vision,” says Donnell. “Kim Dotcom clearly thought, ‘I’ll just pay musicians to work in separate rooms, come up with weird sounds and we’ll put them together in the studio, and that’s how you do music.’”

Like most people who push play, Donnell still hasn’t made it all the way through Good Times, because that album, from the making of it, to the music that made the final cut, was definitively not, in fact, a good time. “It’s a really tough listen,” says Donnell. “Like, obnoxiously bad.”