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nonpromotional songs, the band gave up and joined others in ordering that the company take down the unauthorized files.

In the meantime, Rogers had gotten to know Shawn Fanning through mutual friend Dug Song, an elder statesman from Shawn's hacker group w00w00. “I like Shawn a lot as a person,” Rogers said. “He was in this amazing place, because he had the skills to pull it off, but not the experience to tell him not do it. It got way further down the road than anyone could have imagined.” Napster, Rogers said, was the product of a unique set of circumstances, the most important of which was the dot-com investment fever that hit at the exact moment when Shawn and the opportunists around him were setting out on their quest. If Napster hadn't started just then, he said, “the time could easily have come and gone where people would give you money to do something that is clearly illegal.”

Alternative band the Offspring had a later but even more enthusiastic awakening to the power of the Web. In 1998, Rolling Stone printed the first of a new kind of pop chart: Most Downloaded Songs on the Internet. There, at number one, was the Offspring's new song, “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy).” “The whole thing surprised us,” said band manager Jim Guerinot, who also handles Beck and No Doubt. At one point, the song had been downloaded 22 million times and the band had sold 8 million records. “If we had been downloaded 40 million times, would we have sold 16 million records?” Guerinot wondered. When Napster rose to become the Internet vehicle of choice, Offspring singer Dexter Holland became one of the service's most vocal supporters, touting it in concerts and crediting Napster with much of the band's success.

But like the Beastie Boys, the Offspring expected some sort of business model to be worked out sometime, or at least Napster to ask the band's permission, which would have been granted speedily. Even after the dustup over it selling gear with the Napster logo, the Offspring remained a supporter. The last straw didn't come until much later, when word circulated that Napster was seeking a settlement by offering its stock to the record companies. “Why didn't they come to the artists?” Guerinot asked. “Why not get in bed with the top one hundred artists? They were as bad on the corporate-investment side as they were on everything else. Their strategy was to sell everything out. We just became mortified and asked to withdraw our amicus brief from the lawsuit.

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