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artists were nonetheless alarmed, especially when they toured and heard fans singing along to songs that hadn't been released and were out only in bootleg versions. Others couldn't get too exercised over Napster because they never saw more than their advances. "I don't feel like Napster cut into my royalties, because I generally don't get royalty payments anyway," said Dean Wareham, guitarist and singer for the New York band Luna. Besides, "radio in this country is awful," he said. "So how else are you supposed to find out about music, other than a little harmless file-swapping?"

Some major bands were Napster believers—at least at first. The Beastie Boys was one of them. The members had developed an interest in things Internet as early as 1994, when software writer Ian Rogers, an old friend of singer Mike "Mike D" Diamond, showed him how the Net worked during the rolling Lollapalooza festival. In 1998, Rogers toured with the band and recorded performances through the mixing board, then posted the recordings to the group's website. "I started putting those things up, and it created a big stink for them. They had Capitol questioning them," Rogers said. Band manager John Silva helped the Beasties negotiate to keep the digital rights to their songs, and the band also kept ownership of part of their master recordings. That gave them greater freedom than most of their peers to experiment. Rogers kept close tabs on what was happening in both music and technology: By then he was working at Nullsoft, the tiny company that developed Gnutella. When AOL bought Nullsoft and suggested he move to San Francisco from Los Angeles, Rogers quit and joined the Beasties' own label, Grand Royal, as head of new media. Diamond was already a Napster user, both impressed by its reach and alarmed by its implications. Rogers told him he thought the system was obviously illegal but had tremendous potential for mass exposure.

Grand Royal was selling CDs through its website, and the band began releasing a track or two of each new record, downloadable for free. A link on the site sent Web surfers to the approved cuts on Napster, so Grand Royal could sidestep paying for the server space and bandwidth. "We would do promotions," Rogers said. "But the rest of the record, no. That's what we were trying to make a living on." After waiting in vain for months to see what sort of payment Napster would offer for the band's

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