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the company, begging for a new moderator. Ritter reinstated him, but Chang was eventually demodded for good after he took privileges away from another moderator. Napster lawyers later killed the entire moderator program after America Online’s similarly positioned volunteers sued that company for back pay under fair-labor laws.

After the initial public attention following the RIAA’s December 1999 lawsuit, Napster’s growth became epidemic on college campuses that offered free high-speed access from dorm rooms. Richardson had thought Napster could prove to be the biggest case of viral marketing in history. But she still had underestimated how fast word would spread in academia. Colleges saw their networks clog badly. When they investigated, they discovered that Napster was sucking up virtually all the available bandwidth. Typical was the University of California, San Diego, where Napster’s growth rate stunned the network administrators. “The first effect of this saturation was that Napster became virtually unusable to those on campus, but more importantly, this also slowed all campus Internet traffic,” the administrators wrote on February 1 to all campus residents. “The use of Napster has now begun to impair the vital functions (education, research) of our network to the point that some action MUST be taken. At this point, the only option is to block access to Napster from campus machines.” UCSD set the ban that day, and more than a hundred other campuses followed suit, either because of bandwidth issues or pressure from the RIAA, which was tracking copyrighted music going to student machines.

The campus bans were hotly debated and provided irrefutable proof that Napster had become the fastest-growing application for the Net. That drew still more media to the story, with the Los Angeles Times putting Napster on the front page in February 2000 and the New York Times doing the same in March. Closer to the hearts of the young men at Napster was MTV, which brought a crew to the office that spring and turned Shawn and Parker into teen idols. Of all the media exposure that would come, sometimes two or three national media interviews in a day, the MTV segment proved one of the most difficult. Shawn was quiet and sometimes awkward. It was the glib Parker who wound up with the most