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would not warm the industry’s heart to any kind of digital distribution. “They won’t cede control,” complained Thomas Dolby Robertson, of “She Blinded Me with Science” fame, who is a serious music technologist. “Right now, we have a great system for them and one that screws the artist.”

SHAWN FANNING’S BIG INSIGHT, like his instruction, came from his time on Internet Relay Chat. Similarly to the more prevalent instant messaging of today, IRC knows who is on a channel at any time. It has, in the jargon of the industry, “presence awareness.” Search engines, on the other hand, may scan the Web only daily or weekly. Especially if the search results turn up a private person’s files, instead of those controlled by a business, the content on the site may well have changed or be unavailable. “My idea was to have a real-time index that reflects all sites that are up and available to others on the network at that moment,” Shawn said. The easiest way to accomplish this was to have a central computer server, to which everyone would connect. “Anyone who disconnected from the server would be immediately dropped from our index,” he said.

In a way, the core of the Napster system was an index of other indexes, the lists of music files people kept in folders on their own machines. Like a telephone switchboard operator in the old days, the Napster system would take an inquiry for a specific song from someone, find another person who had a matching offering, connect the two, and then hang up to let them finish the transaction in private.

Shawn ran his idea past a few adults, who gave him various reasons why it wouldn’t work. Too complicated, they said. Shawn listened attentively, weighed their arguments, and didn’t buy any of them. “Somebody would say something negative about it, and some of that stuff really got to me at first. I definitely used that to motivate me,” Shawn said. He believed from the first that Napster could be very important. Back then, he didn’t worry much about legal issues, reasoning that individual users were taking responsibility for offering up every song. Shawn started by designing the search engine to scan the lists of offerings. Then he wrote a draft of the software that would run the server that connected everyone. Finally he turned to the “client,” the application that the user would see.

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