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out making any explicit marketing efforts. And the bigger Napster got before the inevitable awakening of the sleeping giant that was the record industry, the more leverage it would have to cut a good deal. If everything kept going as it was, Napster would have an audience well into the millions, along with a database about music consumers' habits that far out-matched anything the record companies knew about their own customers. Napster would be able to tell Warner Brothers that the average person who had Cure MP3s on his computer was most likely to be interested in finding new music by the Violent Femmes. Oh, and here are all those users' Napster sign-on names if you want to reach them. In the best-case scenario, the deal would turn out to be a Trojan horse that would make Napster even more powerful, at least according to the October memo. So when the Recording Industry Association of America called, appointments were made and then broken. Conversations with the other side were ostensibly cooperative but kept noncommittal, both to forestall a suit and to prevent the RIAA from learning more about the way the system worked. And reporters were fed platitudes. “My initial plan was to stay under the radar and play dumb,” Richardson said.

When a story did break, being one of the few start-ups without PR helped perpetuate the sense that Napster was a true underdog, appealing all the more to its fan base. “It was David versus Goliath, and we had David,” Richardson said. She was smart enough to put Shawn forward as a spokesman. He came across as soft-spoken, intelligent, and good-natured, an ungeeky geek, and his baseball cap became a recognizable trademark. Even record executives found it hard not to like him. As Shawn's popularity grew along with his service, the vast majority assumed that he had control of the firm. With no disclosure requirements of the sort binding publicly traded companies, Napster did little to dislodge the misimpression.

Websites run by geeks and for geeks were the first to take note of Napster and post stories with links to the site. Some of them soon seemed to feature Napster every week. News sites that focused on the music industry's electronic side or MP3s in particular also spilled digital ink on the firm. One of the first broader-audience publications to write about Napster was the online spin-off of Wired magazine known as Wired News, which was following the MP3 scene more closely than most. A

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