San Francisco — While Napster worked Saturday to deploy technology to weed out 1 million song titles, millions of users flooded the site and other servers to trade music record labels say is pirated.
Many of Napster's faithful said the company's promise to block access to some music would ostracize those who have become dependent on the Internet for new music.
"I think it's going to make a lot of people mad," said 19-year-old Andrea Gordon of San Jose. "I think they're going to lose a lot of customers."
Napster attorney David Boies told a federal judge Friday that the move to block Metallica and Dr. Dre songs and 5,600 other titles would begin some time this weekend.
Napster said on its Web site that it's not easy to exclude the files. "It is a complex technological solution that is very taxing to the system and will degrade the operation of the service," the notice read. "It has involved a significant investment of time and resources."
Some Napster users said they would quickly use other systems if Napster became a headache.
"I might just stop using Napster and try to get these other services," said Alex Densmore, a 20-year-old engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley. "As other people are driven away from Napster, more people will go to these alternative file-sharing programs. There's just an incredible demand."
Napster and several alternatives were swamped with users Saturday.
On just one of Napster's 80 servers, 11,000 users traded nearly 2.2 million songs. Users freely traded songs like Metallica's "Unforgiven," which the band requested be blocked from the service.
Napigator, an alternative system that directs the Napster program to servers around the world, listed hundreds of thousands of users logged on sharing tunes.
Many of these alternative Napster servers had more than 25,000 users. One server maintained a list of 6.4 million songs traded.
The Gnutella network, which connects users with each other directly rather than through centralized servers like Napster, was busy as well.
The busiest portion of the peer-to-peer network logged 13,400 hosts sharing 14.3 million audio, video and text files, according to Clip2, a peer-to-peer network monitoring service. Several smaller clusters of Gnutella network users also shared thousands of files through programs like BearShare, LimeWire and ToadNode.
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