It was all an absolute mess.

ALL THE RAVE

The Rise and Fall
of Shawn Fanning’s Napster

By Joseph Menn
ALL THE RAVE: The Rise and fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster (Crown Business / April 15, 2003) by Joseph Menn is the only insider's look at this giant business and cultural phenomenon. The author enjoyed access to Shawn Fanning, other major players in the company, and has been privy to reams of secret court records and correspondence between Napster executives. Everyone has talked to him — and to no one else.

Menn's account of Napster is reminiscent of Barbarians At The Gate. It's epic in proportion and wonderfully evocative of the whole dot-com world at its peak and nadir, complete with sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

Napster stands as the fastest growing businesses in history. At seventeen, its founder, Shawn Fanning, transformed a computer program he had designed into something that turned the Internet into an unlimited library of free music. Tens of millions of young people quickly signed on. Time magazine put Fanning on its cover. And the powerful music industry vowed to stop it.

The media latched onto the story and followed every detail of the astonishing rise and gradual fall of Napster. But Napster carefully controlled its coverage, and no one ever found out what was going on behind the scenes – or how devious the corporate politics had become.

Told largely from the perspective of Napster’s young creators, the book documents everything about the companies amazing rollercoaster ride, beginning with a man few have heard of – Shawn’s uncle John Fanning. The struggling businessman with a history of litigation and debts controlled his nephew's creation and bears ultimate responsibility for the company's collapse. Menn gets at the heart of why such an intelligent – although ego-driven – group of people abandoned the strategies that could have made Napster into a legal and immensely profitable company. Was it the internal backstabbing? The rebellious office culture? The lack of leadership? The sheer greed and self-dealing? In fact, it's all these things.

The Napster saga isn't just the historical record of a revolutionary business, one that launched a still-growing technological groundswell toward peer-to-peer computing. The ramifications continue to unfold in Capitol Hill confrontations between the technology and entertainment giants. ALL THE RAVE shows how such Napster successors as Kazaa learned the lessons of the story and made themselves virtually impossible to shut down. At the same time, it shows how the movie industry is squandering the advantage of having watched the record industry do battle first. Finally, the book explains how Napster's imprudent gamble set up a backlash against consumers that now threatens to wipe out decades' worth of fair-use rights.

The Napster phenomenon sprang from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm — rapid advances in technology, a dinosaur-like record industry, and investor mania that lead even prominent venture capitalist firms to wager millions on what was clearly a losing legal proposition. Fanning's dream was strangled as the investors who controlled the company foolishly tried to blackmail the establishment into a settlement. Still, Napster is actually a story of triumph — its technology has been embraced by billion-dollar companies and adapted for everything from cancer research to the search for extraterrestrial life.

Joseph Menn has written on Silicon Valley and technology for the Los Angeles Times for four years. He has won several national and state awards for his journalism, including a “Best in Business” Award from The Society of American Business Editors & Writers, and has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His reporting and writing on the Microsoft story has been nominated for a 2003 Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious in business journalism. He is a co-author of the book The People Vs. Big Tobacco.