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Some artists who said nothing at all about Napster helped its cause indirectly. Generally speaking, the more obscure a band was, the more likely it was to applaud greater exposure through Napster. Midsize and larger bands, while less likely to be outright Napster supporters, were more likely to feel cheated by their long-term and unrewarding contracts with the major labels. Those acts now had two new things to be mad about. The first was their contracts. And the second was that Napster could be hurting their sales, and the labels weren't coming up with reasonable alternatives.

As they chafed under the dual pressure, some bands set up their own retail operations online. One was the cult band Ween, which hailed from New Hope, Pennsylvania. Ween recorded on Elektra for eleven years, with sales that kept rising until the band had sold a fairly impressive 1 million albums total. Yet by the end of its contract, Ween had not only never seen a royalty check, it still owed the label $1.2 million from its advances. On a lark, the band recorded a Christmas album independently and offered it for sale through its website. Total sales: about 3,000 records. Total income: about $40,000. But the band got to keep all that income. A big, fat lightbulb appeared over the band members' heads, and they considered running their own tiny label. But Ween was torn. Three thousand people aren't very many fans. "They don't want to be a clique for geeks," a friend of the band explained. If they go back to a major label, they stay poor, but more people will hear them.

SO FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER, Napster's popularity helped prod more stars to speak out about the injustice of their contracts. And they did more than speak. Don Henley cofounded the Recording Artists Coalition, which raised funds with performances by a wide range of performers, including Billy Joel, Sheryl Crow, Stevie Nicks, and Dwight Yoakam. "I got signed to a deal with a company that was sucking my blood for twenty-five years," John Fogerty told the crowd at one benefit concert. "I just don't want that to happen to nobody else." More stars filed lawsuits for back royalties, and some of them won millions of dollars when the labels were caught using sleight-of-hand accounting. And the coalition itself filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Napster's side in the labels' law-

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