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more basic than their positive feelings about spreading free music. Brooks and New Artist Program manager Stephanie Norton also had secret talks with bands like Korn and Matchbox 20, offering special placement on Napster's Web pages in exchange for their endorsements. Band promotions and an “aggregation of legit partners makes us look legit and makes every partner in the industry realize they need to play ball,” Brooks wrote in an e-mail. The executives took pains to keep the negotiations confidential. As Norton noted in one internal message, “these bands are in a sticky situation with their labels for setting up meetings with us. We don't want to piss anyone off.”

Always combative by nature, John Fanning couldn't have cared less about antagonizing the labels. And others in the company didn't see much point in spending money on free concerts or promoting certain bands on the website. The vast majority of Napster users weren't looking for obscure music, and touting selected acts might be seen as selling out. If Napster fans sensed the shift, that might work against the company and its phenomenal growth rate. And that, in turn, might make it harder to get quite as much money when the time came to really sell out, to the record labels. But the most serious reason for foot-dragging on the New Artist Program, according to Sean Parker, was a legal one. “Eileen definitely wanted to do it, and it went to the board. But it didn't make sense because it had a different interface” than the rest of the song-searching. Since all of the participating New Artists gave explicit permission for their work to be on Napster, the presence of a distinct piece of the system that had only authorized songs could tempt the judge in the record-industry lawsuit to order Napster to keep that part and disable the rest. “We were arguing that there were a lot of noninfringing uses with the main services,” Parker said. “We had to stick to our guns with an all-or-nothing approach, so we didn't need a dog-and-pony show.”

The internal arguments appeared vital to Richardson and Brooks. But they obscured a much more fundamental problem. None of Napster's directors had dealt with the record industry before, and they had horribly misjudged their opponent. Even if the board had gotten behind the New Artist effort or won widespread enthusiasm from big-name bands, it likely wouldn't have moved the industry. After all, the big record labels had a history of opposing most innovations in technology. They were

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