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One debate was whether Napster should eventually charge a monthly fee or instead charge per download. Another possibility was to adopt a combination approach, akin to cable companies charging different monthly rates for basic and premium service, then adding pay-per-view revenues on top of that. A separate issue was who would keep whatever money came in. At one extreme, the Napster crew considered offering the record labels every cent from the sale of music, while Napster would keep the profits from selling items like rock-’n’-roll merchandise. But how to structure a legitimate and sustainable business was simply not the focus. Fanning’s deputy, Tom Carmody, flew out from Hull once for an inspection. When he was done, he called everyone together. “A business is like a person,” Carmody said. “Napster has a spirit. It has a body. But it doesn’t have a brain.”

One of the first sketches of the Napster plan was drawn in early October 1999, when it had 150,000 registered users and 22,000 simultaneous users. (Some people have questioned Napster’s claims for the number of registered users it had, which is a natural reaction to a figure that eventually climbed above 70 million. Napster counted such users by their log-on names. Users could register more than once at Napster, but the most common reason people reregister at other Internet service firms is that they forget their passwords. Napster’s servers stored users’ passwords for them, so they didn’t have to be remembered. A second reason for inflation would be users who were banned trying to get back on. But relatively few people were banned from Napster before the service went dark, and many families shared one user name. So the logical conclusion is that the highest figures were only modest exaggerations. Ritter and another engineer who kept tabs on internal traffic reports believe that the service had more than 40 million users at its peak.) The main author of the four-page strategy document, which was discovered in litigation later but kept out of the public court file, has never been established. Parker said it was the result of groupthink, the record of a written discussion in progress. Meant for internal eyes only, the conversational paper lays out a “road map summary” of the new company’s goals, showing that even then, the point was to cash out, not to make money the old-fashioned way, improve the technology for its own sake, or make sure the law was being followed.

“CLOSE ANGEL FUNDING,” one section all in capital letters begins.