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Napster to look for live performances by independent bands that didn't mind their music being distributed.

Paulson was featured in dozens of interviews from MTV to CNN as a young spokesman for the Napster movement. Unlike those inside the company, whose words were governed by public-relations and legal concerns, Paulson could speak his mind. Napster adopted him as a virtual poster boy, and Paulson had more than a dozen chats with Shawn, Parker, and Napster product manager Brandon Barber. Paulson thought Napster could evolve into an amazing promotion vehicle for bands that never got big contracts. But Shawn and the others didn't spend a lot of time talking about that, he said. They seemed militant about changing the industry as a whole. “I had my own agenda, what I thought Napster would be great for,” Paulson recalled. “They had their own agenda, but they wouldn't tell me what it was. They were like, ‘This is great, we're really sticking it to them.’ I didn't really get it. They were definitely playing the role of victim, but Shawn was more interested in breaking down the system and seeing what happened.”

As with rock music itself forty years before, public opinion on Napster divided largely along generational lines. Older, more-established Americans generally saw it as a clear case of piracy. Students and music fans in their twenties often saw it as mildly illegal—or soon to be ruled illegal—but morally fine, like exceeding the speed limit by five miles an hour. Some of the more studious defenders pointed out that artists realized very little money from their recording contracts or that compact-disc prices were absurdly marked up. One student interviewed on MTV said the amount of guilt he felt varied by the artist: He decided it was fine to rip off a no-talent band, or one that was already wealthy beyond imagination. Others embarked on different varieties of philosophical hairsplitting and rationalization. By the million, they were willing to take legal risks and moral stretches that they saw as small, and some declared that they would never buy another CD.

Among users under thirty, who would make up half of Napster's eventual user base, the antiestablishment feel of the system dovetailed with the rebellious posturing of much of the music they listened to. (For