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at first ignored by the industry, then embraced with a sudden urgency as Napster took flight. By then, the labels wanted something to counter Napster, and they wanted to show federal antitrust officials and such critics as Sen. Orrin Hatch, chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, that they were doing something to put content online. But the effort to get MusicNet and its companion site Pressplay up and running was a lesson in abject frustration for those involved in the project, giving a hint of what Napster would be up against when its time came to deal.

MusicNet began in the Seattle offices of RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, who refused to believe that the recording industry wouldn't change. Glaser was a visionary, and he tended to think that the CEOs in the music business were innovators as well. A Microsoft veteran, Glaser had walked away from a lucrative career at the software giant to run his own operation, developing the RealPlayer application for viewing videos over the Internet. As an afterthought, he worked on a version to play music. After RealPlayer became one of the most downloaded programs on the Net, Glaser figured that he ought to be able to interest the record companies in a plan that would allow them to charge users for each song they downloaded, with RealNetworks or a joint venture taking a small percentage of each transaction. Reasoning that media attention might give others the same idea or even scare the industry hard-liners away, Glaser worked on his plan in near-total secrecy before Napster hit the world stage.

Glaser's first recruit was Alan Citron, a former entertainment-industry journalist who had risen to become president of Ticketmaster/Multimedia in Los Angeles. After Barry Diller's USA Networks bought Ticketmaster, Citron was looking for something new to do, and all the prognosticators said that music was about to be the next killer application on the Internet. He took the job, with the basic mission to sign up labels for the project, promising each of them equity in the new venture alongside RealNetworks. The thinking was that even if they didn't like the idea of digital-music distribution, the potential IPO windfall would be too much to pass up. In October 1999, Citron rented an office in Universal Music Group's building in Los Angeles, figuring that he would charm the label's executives as he got to know them in the halls. "We'll be pals before you know it," Citron thought. In fact, Universal was in the