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download a three-minute song. But IUMA drew fans nonetheless. Lord, who would later cross paths with Napster, took a very different approach from the one that Shawn would take. The first songs he encoded to the MP2 format, rare tracks by the Durutti Column and the Residents, he kept in his computer for his own use. In a decision that would come to appear quaint, and still later would appear to have been the right idea after all, Lord didn't distribute those songs over the newsgroups for the simple reason that he didn't have permission from the copyright holders. IUMA cadged free equipment from Sun Microsystems Inc. and Silicon Graphics Inc. and hired people from the Santa Cruz music scene, who by 1994 convinced other bands to pay in order to post their music.

When a newspaper article about IUMA appeared that year, the record labels took note. Yet despite some internal debate, they did little to encourage the new technology—or to fight it, since MP2s could also spread music without the copyright owner's permission. Things changed over the next three years. Connections to the Internet got faster. The World Wide Web and the Netscape browser spread at fantastic rates, making it much easier for people to find what they were looking for. And in Germany, research efforts to improve video-compression technology had spun off a vastly improved audio-compression technique. After approval by the International Standards Organization, ISO-MPEG Audio Layer-3 emerged, soon to be better known as MP3. The source code was made available, so that anyone could distribute the tools for encoding music to the new format. By eliminating data used to convey silences, the MP3 technique fit much more sound into many fewer bits, making transmission and storage much easier. And the developers hadn't bothered to include any system for locking the data to prevent copying.

The software for opening and playing such files on computers got better too, especially one called Winamp, cobbled together in 1997 by a nineteen-year-old college dropout in Sedona, Arizona, named Justin Frankel. A geek's geek, Frankel gave Winamp away and asked for a minimal payment on the honor system if the users liked it, a process for software known as shareware. Winamp wasn't the first MP3 player, but it brought together a number of features that quickly established it as the most popular. Winamp let users make the player look like whatever they wanted, and it could be customized easily to work with other programs.

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