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music files on this page. Do you see those?” Richardson did see those; there they were. And she admitted it was likely that yes, they had been downloaded from Napster. Other Napster executives’ hard drives didn’t help the cause. Liz Brooks had seven Beatles songs, five Led Zeppelin songs, and seven Bjork songs, among others. Lyn Jensen was evidently a Shania Twain fan, with five cuts. At least Kessler’s practice was close to the official line on Napster’s mission to aid the discovery of new music, boasting three obscure Irish folk songs in addition to a track from the Dave Matthews Band.

Frackman also made Richardson eat her words about “collaborative filtering,” by which, she had told reporters, Napster would recommend music based on what users liked and on what people with similar tastes liked, just as Amazon.com does for books. No such system had been put in place during her nine months on the job, though it would have been with Gigabeat. And Frackman hammered on the New Artist Program, which had taken so long to finally reach the website, in a fairly unusable form, just a month earlier. In the program’s first phase, bands could fill out profiles about themselves, giving information about influences that was supposed to be searchable in later incarnations. In the interim, however, it was just a list of songs and artists, with no navigational guide.

In fairness, Richardson had been serious about the New Artist Program—she just couldn’t get much support for it from the board or her fellow executives. Adrian Scott, the Napster investor brought in by Bill Bales, remembered discussing strategy at the office the previous fall with Shawn, Parker, Bales, and adviser Brett Bullington of Excite. Midway through the meeting, Richardson walked in, “and she was on a totally different plane,” Scott said. “She was talking about unsigned artists. And we were like, ‘hello?’” The balance of power on the issue didn’t go Richardson’s way even after the lawsuit began. VP Liz Brooks, in trying to defend the stripped-down New Artist Program as more than window-dressing, gave a typical response in an April e-mail to a critic in the music business: “There will always be a mass of people who only want to hear the current pop hits. Our job is not to force a musical education on these people.”

But it wouldn’t have done Napster any good for Richardson to say she had tried and failed, so she held her tongue. After Frackman ran through

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