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Prologue :
A Party out of Control

NAPSTER FOUNDER SHAWN FANNING WAS FEELING GOOD. In the limo on the way to a massive Halloween rave in Oakland, California, the eighteen-year-old had swallowed a tab of Ecstasy, and now it was weaving a pleasant cocoon around him. Inside the warehouse, the dancers swirled to the techno beat. Well-built and stocky from lifting weights, Shawn kept drinking water and trying not to grind his teeth. Normally shy, he was beaming at perfect strangers. Drugs aside, there was no reason not to: Shawn was surrounded by things that he loved. Good friends, youth culture at its antiestablishment best, and the music that was his passion. And it was for the right cause—his cause. Napster was a cosponsor of the festivities, and the new company's banner and stickers were on display. In the haze of that evening in October 1999, it didn't seem to matter that most of the other people there had never heard of his brain-child. It didn't matter that Napster's booth was slipshod and the last to go up. And it didn't matter that Napster's new chief executive was on Ecstasy too. That was sort of nice. "It was stupid. But it was a lot of fun," Shawn said later.

What did matter was that Shawn was a long way from his rough Massachusetts childhood—some of it spent on welfare, part of it spent in a foster home—and that he would never again face days like that. He was riding the Internet explosion that had transformed his new home, the San Francisco Bay area, into a pulsating mass of parties, easy money, and

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