📸 Photo

control of Napster, perhaps “by replacing HB [Hank Barry] with a Bertelsmann manager.” The team wrote that it would be “legally difficult, but doable” to develop a lawful way to get rid of Barry, and the executives mused about promoting Shawn to co-CEO alongside a Bertelsmann loyalist.

Just two weeks after Patel ruled that Napster would stay dark until it could block 100 percent of the infringing material, Hank Barry finally named his replacement. He remained a Napster director and went back to Hummer Winblad full-time. Successor Konrad Hilbers was the first career businessman to take the reins at the now-desperate company. A German with a doctorate in business who had worked at a U.S. bank, Hilbers’s most important qualification was a stamp of approval from Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff—just as Bertelsmann’s managers had wanted. Middelhoff had cultivated a personal relationship with Shawn, one that had a strong impact on the youth, so his endorsement meant even more. “I like Thomas a lot,” Shawn said. “When things got really down, he was actually a major reason that a lot of times I chose to stick it out. He believes in us so much, and he chose to put a lot of his own personal credibility and other things behind it.” Hilbers, too, seemed like “a nice guy” to Shawn—perhaps too much so. “I was wondering, wow, does he know what he’s getting into here? The music industry, the circumstances, the characters involved, the amount of work . . . Konrad just came off as just a nice guy, and I was wondering if he was going to be cut out for it.” But Shawn decided within a few months that Hilbers was nearly perfect. “It has been the greatest decision we have ever made. The organization needed some help. We needed to be cleaned up, we needed some help with structuring engineering.”

If Napster’s most logical remaining exit strategy was a takeover by Bertelsmann, it could only help Barry to have someone in the lead who was known and respected by the German company. A buttoned-down but strategic thinker, Hilbers had worked for Bertelsmann’s business-development team, as chief financial officer of its publisher Bantam Doubleday Dell, and as CFO of AOL Europe. A last six-month stint as chief administrative officer at Bertelsmann’s BMG music division had been less pleasant, as Hilbers clashed with the rest of the bureaucracy there. During settlement negotiations on BMG’s behalf with Napster, he