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company were inspired. And Richardson believed she could turn their invention into something the record industry would love—a way to market new music to potential fans, based on what they liked, for virtually nothing.

As the good feeling built up under the canopy behind Napster’s booth, it was easy to forget that like the rave scene itself, the Napster movement was based on the unstable allure of illegal behavior. And it was easy for Shawn to forget what bothered him more than that: his blowhard uncle John. John Fanning had served as a surrogate father during much of Shawn’s difficult childhood. He had hired Shawn to work at the online-games firm he ran in Hull, Massachusetts, and Fanning had even bought Shawn his first computer and that sports car in high school. But their relationship was far from perfect. A dropout from Boston College, the thirty-five-year-old Fanning fancied himself a successful businessman, destined to make the cover of Fortune magazine. His track record suggested that was unlikely, and the games firm was struggling when Shawn told his uncle about Napster. Fanning realized it could be huge and moved quickly to incorporate Napster Inc. with the Massachusetts secretary of state. And he took one more step, laying a minefield that would dictate every major direction that Napster would take in the crucial next year: Fanning awarded himself 70 percent of the company, leaving just 30 percent for his nephew. Shawn was stunned, but Fanning said that no one was going to fund a company majority-owned by an eighteen-year-old. He said that Shawn needed his business contacts and savvy. Since Fanning had taken care of Shawn before, the young man signed the papers.

Fanning’s grab did far more than injure his nephew. It changed the balance of power at Napster to one favoring a completely different set of motivations. And it didn’t take long before that shift started shaping Napster’s destiny. Fanning’s chief virtue, he told Shawn, was his business credibility and fund-raising power. Yet the majority of the potential investors looked at the technology and applauded, looked at Shawn and Parker and approved, and then looked at John Fanning and blanched. One near-investor explained that he thought he could handle what he predicted would be a serious legal issue, or handle a semi-involved uncle with too much ego and too much equity—but not both. After months of effort by Parker and Fanning, Silicon Valley investor Amram agreed to

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