(3 of 7)
Then, as if everyone had just been waiting for it, Napster--some kid's Big Idea--appeared. And suddenly all these pieces of the puzzle fit together. We could all become music pirates because it was just so damn easy to do--easier even than ordering a CD online. And once that happened, would we ever be able to go back to getting into our car, driving to the mall and buying a shrink-wrapped piece of plastic with a little silver disc inside? "I don't know how to stop it," says Atlantic Records Group co-chairman Val Azzoli, of the problems created by Napster. "It's not just music I'm worried about. It's all intellectual properties. If you can take music, you can take everything else too."
Fanning never intended to hijack the music industry. The idea for Napster just came to him as he was sitting in his dorm room at Northeastern University in Boston, hanging out with his bros, drinking a brew and listening to his roommate whine about dead MP3 links. Fanning, whose high school nickname was the Napster (a reference to his perpetually nappy hair), just shrugged. But he began thinking there might be a way to access files without going through a website. He had taught himself Unix programming between his junior and senior years at Harwich High in Cape Cod. And he knew enough to think such a program would have to be possible. "I had this idea that there was a lot of material out there sitting on people's hard drives," he says. "I mean, even if you were at [search-engine websites like] Lycos or Scour, you were still looking at people's hard drives. So that's the idea, that there's all this stuff sitting on people's PCs--and I had to figure out a way to go and get it."
The concept had lodged itself in his head, and he couldn't shake it. He began taking his notebook computer everywhere--to basketball games and the pizzeria--and tapping away on it, working out some basic programming kernels and wondering if this were even possible.
One January evening, as he rode back to campus with his cousin Brian Fanning, he was, as usual, totally absorbed with his idea. "I'm like that. Once I begin focusing on something, I'll just keep going until it's done. I cut off the outside world." When the BMW pulled up to his red-brick dorm, Fanning absentmindedly got out of the car and began walking up the path. After two steps, he stopped. Brian, who was about to pull away, waited as Fanning turned around, strolled back to the car, opened the door and climbed back in. "I'm not going back to school," he told his cousin. Brian shrugged and drove off. It was Shawn's problem.
His mom and stepdad, of course, gave him hell, delivering the usual platitudes about how he'd regret it and wouldn't amount to anything without a degree. "When he didn't go back to school, it crushed me," recalls Coleen Verrier, Fanning's mom. "But he explained he had these things he said were urgent." Fanning was unfazed. He felt he had no choice. The idea had become too big. It possessed him. He never went back to his dorm room, leaving behind his clothes, books and bedding. He took his computer with him, of course.