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idea out of hand. The biggest draw may have been the enormous public exposure that would come with the job. And if the company could re-emerge, the CEO would be a hero to music fans and businesspeople alike. But many candidates who came to Napster's new offices in Redwood City ended their trip more confused than they had been before.

The CEO job would not have been an easy sell in any case. Napster was functioning only because the preliminary injunction against it had been stayed pending an appeal, and most appeals fail. Beyond the court case, Napster was in a perpetual state of uncertainty. “Hank was busily going around trying to ink deals with other labels, and he was being fairly unsuccessful doing that. At the same time, they were trying to rewrite the system to be able to conform to a royalty structure,” one serious candidate said. “The issues included how they were going to transition to a pay service, how to account for it, and how it would work from a mechanical perspective,” he said. “Most importantly, in talking to Hank, it was obvious they didn't know the profile of the guy they wanted, because they didn't know what the service was going to look like. At the end of the day, since they didn't know what the strategy was, they couldn't agree on who the person was.”

One explanation for the confusion was that Barry and his partners had different ideas than the rest of Napster and Bertelsmann about how to proceed. A number of candidates thought they had offers from Barry, who purported to be running the show, only to find out that he had been outvoted by the Napster board or other influencers. “There were a lot of decision makers,” one person close to the process said. “You had different companies with different objectives and cultures.” As the search dragged on from Barry's appointment in May 2000 until past the same month the following year, a less-charitable interpretation emerged: that Barry liked being CEO, and even though he took pains to refer to himself as “interim” chief, he would be perfectly happy to continue in the job for as long as possible.

While Eileen Richardson had pushed Shawn alone in front of the cameras, Barry was allotting himself more of the spotlight. He did more of the speaking than Shawn at joint press conferences, and he made many more trips to testify in Washington and to speak at industry conferences. Some CEO candidates concluded that Barry was running such a long,

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