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industry boon when music lovers went out and repurchased their collections in the new format.

The lack of access to new music would prove to be one of the big drivers behind Napster’s explosive growth. Another factor for which the record industry bears responsibility is the collective disgust among consumers at the price of compact discs, which cost only about $1 apiece to physically manufacture and package. Since the product was so much cheaper to make than old vinyl records, many consumers assumed that the retail prices would come down as well, at least after their first few years on the market. Instead, the prices inexplicably began heading toward $20 for collections of material that often included only one song a consumer wanted. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigated why the prices were rising and ultimately came up with an answer. The clue came when some home-electronics stores began selling discounted CDs in order to bring in store traffic. The resulting competition drove prices down to $10 for many titles. And the industry decided to fight back in the mid-1990s by requiring retailers to agree to advertise higher prices in order to get millions of dollars in funds for joint marketing. The FTC accused the Big Five labels, which shared 85 percent of the U.S. CD market, of apparent collusion in violation of antitrust laws. In a 2000 settlement of the charges, the labels agreed to drop the practice, which the FTC estimated cost consumers almost half a billion dollars. A subsequent suit by thirty states seeking to recover that money was settled in September 2002 for $143 million.

The CD price-fixing lawsuits were not the industry’s first brush with antitrust accusations, and they wouldn’t be the last. Napster’s last-ditch defense in its own lawsuit would be that it couldn’t be found to be infringing copyrights when the labels themselves were abusing the copyrights by acting collectively to keep the music from digital use. That long-shot counterargument would be enough to stave off what had seemed to be certain death through summary judgment through at least 2002. The Justice Department also began investigating the issue. Yet it would be a mistake to view the five labels as a monolith, each company marching in lockstep with the others. In fact, there would be many times that the companies, which competed heatedly for artists and sales, were also at odds on issues of politics or philosophy. One of the five majors was

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