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at $24.95 a month, did allow consumers to burn up to twenty tracks a month onto a CD, and the other downloaded tracks didn't expire so long as the user kept up the subscription payments. But both services lacked the best content, and listeners stayed away in droves.

MusicNet and Pressplay aside, the doves in the record industry did many small deals, afraid as they were of piracy. But even the most liberal were flummoxed by Napster's approach. Two of the biggest doves, responsible for eighty electronic deals in three years, were Ted Cohen and his boss Jay Samit, an executive vice president at EMI and much more of a technophile than a record-industry man. Internally, they had to overcome fear that the music would be stolen and institutional resistance to new forms of distribution—a resistance so intense that when Samit worked on new media at Universal, his request to buy the domain name Universal.com for $5,000 was turned down. They also had to deal with an accounting system from the Stone Age. "Digitized content? None of the companies even had digitized contracts," Samit said. There was no way to sort out electronically who had which rights to what song.

Once they got past those hurdles, the men had to structure deals of enormous complexity. To begin with, songs carry with them multiple sets of rights holders. The label might own the rights to one performed version of a song. Someone else often has the rights to the underlying composition. And there was a complicating difference between performance royalties—paid for a concert and perhaps a digital stream—and mechanical royalties, which are paid for radio play and the like. Then there's the problem of the different laws in each country and the different rights that many contracts assigned, depending on where the sale or performance occurred.

"Let's say I download a song on my Nokia in Japan," Samit said. "It's by a German band. The master [recording] is owned in Hong Kong. Let's forget about sampling [songs borrowing from previous recordings]. But I'm paying with a U.S. credit card . . ." The issues go on and on. "It seems silly. But we're the deep pockets that get sued if something goes wrong." Still, Samit persevered. A patent-holding technologist who had created the laser disc, he believed that online connection with fans was an

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