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been “shared” with him, though he was thinking about buying one. The onstage banter was as brief as Britney’s outfit. “The sooner I can get off stage the better,” Shawn said before introducing the teen pop star.

More to Shawn’s liking were the concerts he got access to through Napster, and the chance to meet idols like Billy Corgan, then with the band Smashing Pumpkins. In a backstage chat after a Pumpkins show, Shawn connected to Corgan at a level that had little to do with music and more to do with the difficulties of success. “It was before the Pumpkins broke up,” Shawn said. “Billy was really unhappy. It was hard to talk to him, because he was kind of in his own world. I understand it now, because I’ve been there. You go through a period of burnout with something, and you know you have to make a decision. You’re consumed by it. You’re trying to figure out how to let something go, how to move on from something. Next time I saw him was after the band had broken up and he was working on a side project, and he was incredibly happy.”

Shawn himself didn’t seem very happy in interviews he gave the media around that time, and he was often unsmiling in photographs. He said that he was having at least a little fun at the company, that it was just hard to do it in front of prying eyes. “I enjoy talking about Napster but not having to do press. If anybody saw me on camera, that probably means I wasn’t having fun,” Shawn said. “If you’re, like, a musician or a sports player, you know if you do really well, you’re going to be famous or there’s going to be some notoriety associated with that. But if you’re a computer coder, you really don’t expect that kind of stuff to happen. A lot of times, I would hear about an interview, and it would just make me nervous and affect my ability to work.”

That didn’t diminish the sex appeal. The September 2000 issue of Vanity Fair included a photo feature on “enfantpreneurs,” with Shawn looking miserable. The writer described him as “shy, street-smart beefcake.” Shawn’s fame peaked with his appearance on the cover of the October 2 Time magazine. The writer had been to the offices six weeks before, when Napster spokesman Josef Robey sent a companywide e-mail asking employees to behave and to remove any “Hilary/Lars target practice signs” and other indications of revolutionary spirit. The article painted a flattering and largely accurate portrait of Shawn, though it omitted his hacker roots and the internal chaos at Napster.

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