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2

a big idea

BY THE FALL OF 1998, WHEN SHAWN FANNING STARTED AT Boston’s Northeastern University, digital music was still very much hit or miss. MP3s had become the standard, growing in popularity largely because they weren’t encumbered by electronic straitjackets on their use. Many services offered lists of songs in the format, including MP3.com, MP3.lycos.com, and Scour.com. But more than half the time, the electronic links to those songs were broken—the song was no longer there. Other sites required passwords or knowledge of File Transfer Protocol commands for transmitting files. It was hardly worth the effort to try. “The index would become out of date because the indexes were updated infrequently,” Shawn would testify. “I began thinking about ways to solve the reliability problems.”

Shawn was coming at the issue in the same way that many Internet innovators had come at earlier roadblocks. The entire point of the World

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