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More than a few of Napster’s employees and most of its fans would have been disappointed by any compromise with the labels. The service’s popularity had always contained an element of perversity: The great attraction for many was that Napster offered an incredibly easy way to break the law. As Napster neared the end of its rope in court, that perversion intensified. The more endangered the company became, the more users flocked to the service to get what they could while they still had the chance. And that added to Napster’s strategic dilemma. “Your biggest problem,” Rosen told Barry, “is that instead of a business, you created a movement. And it’s impossible to convert it.” Every time Napster could have shifted models, Rosen said later, “they were hampered in doing so because of the perceived ‘we can’t do this to the community we created.’” In the end, she said, “I have never seen a brilliant idea handled so badly, bungled by such greed and so many opportunities lost.”

All the traffic, combined with the Robin Hood pose, made Shawn Fanning an international celebrity. And he was beginning to enjoy the extra money he had gotten when Barry took over—eventually more than $100,000 in annual salary. He would also sell more than $100,000 in stock. He bought a BMW convertible and spent thousands of dollars constructing a makeshift recording studio to go with the gym and pool table in his plain but spacious Mountain View home. And he didn’t fend off all of the women that sought him out. For much of the time after Hummer Winblad’s investment, he focused on one woman who was close at hand: Alicia Morga, the beautiful young lawyer who followed Barry from Wilson Sonsini to Hummer Winblad, and who joined Napster in turn as Barry’s assistant. Few within the company and even fewer outside knew about the relationship. Shawn didn’t talk about it because he wanted to keep what little privacy he had. And Morga didn’t talk about it because she worried that the personal and professional overlap could hurt her reputation at Hummer Winblad.

Shawn “didn’t turn into an asshole. He’s still a good kid,” Ritter said. “But as the press kicked in, and he was on the cover of this magazine and that magazine, he had less time to code. Then he got used to not coding.” Shawn sometimes frustrated Ritter and Kessler with how long he took to make modest upgrades to the Napster client. As Shawn lost some of his drive, he devoted hours to distractions like the game Quake 3, which the