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Wide Web had been to make information available to people using whatever connections and computers they had, whenever they had them. “The system should not constrain the user; a person should be able to link with equal ease to any document wherever it happened to be stored,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor. “The basic revelation was that one information space could include them all, giving huge power and consistency.” When Berners-Lee was doing his pioneering work, the content available was static. Now content was changing more often, and Shawn was about to try an ambitious method to help the system’s users catch up to it.

Digital music on computers had gotten off to a slow start, largely because narrow-band connections meant that it took too long to download anything containing as much data as a song. Some of the biggest early consumers were fans of the Grateful Dead, whose members had realized in the late 1960s that permitting bootlegs of concerts would help their paying fan base grow. (Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, a prep-school friend of the band’s guitarist Bob Weir, would later cofound the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defended other music-sharing services in court, but not Napster.)

College students drove many of the next advances in the spread of digital music, including a turning point at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It was there in 1993 that Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson, two computer- and information-science majors and full-time music fans, tried various methods for posting songs from Patterson’s band, the Ugly Mugs, to Internet newsgroups. The band spent $100 on software to compress the music using MP2 technology, the best then available. And they steered potential listeners to a free MP2 player, one made by a firm called Xing Technologies. They got a few enthusiastic e-mails asking for more music. The really exciting thing for Patterson was that some of the messages came from places like Turkey and Russia, where it was hard to get Western music.

Within a month, Lord and Patterson started what they dubbed the Internet Underground Music Archive. The idea was that IUMA, with the permission of the artists, would make available alternative music that wasn’t getting mass distribution. With only limited compression from the MP2 format and slow dial-up modems, it could take half an hour to

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