All The Rave

livegoats writes "No self-respecting culture maven can deny their love affair with Napster. If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves. Oh, Napster, we loved ye when. Joseph Menn's All The Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster carefully chronicles the life of the company -- from its age of innocence, though its battle with the powerful music industry, to its slow unraveling in 2001, a foreshadowing event for the rest of the dot-com world." Read on for Livegoats' review. All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster author Joseph Menn pages 368 publisher Crown Publishing Group rating 7 reviewer Libe Goad ISBN 0609610937 summary If you love to read about the dot-com bust -- over and over -- this meticulously researched tome is for you. Keep a drink handy, however, it gets dry in parts.

One thing's certain: Menn, who covered Silicon Valley for the Los Angeles Times, meticulously researched his subject. The book is loaded with facts and figures, but more impressive is the level of National Enquirer-worthy details Menn milked from mountains of transcripts and one-on-one interviews.

Menn's discoveries can be described as nothing less than shocking, at least for anyone who hasn't followed the story blow-by-blow. We learn about Shawn's money-grubbing uncle, John Fanning, whose shady business practices cost the company numerous investors, but also the respect of his own family. Menn writes that at first Shawn Fanning was pleased when his uncle drew up papers incorporating Napster, Inc. Then the elder Fanning told Shawn he would be getting only 30 percent of the company. John Fanning would keep the rest. Shawn was stunned.

Menn also exposes Napster executives' ignorance of copyright laws, the company's pay-off to rapper Chuck D so he would publicly support file sharing and rockstress Courtney Love's flirtations with Shawn, whom she once introduced at an award show as her future husband.

With a boatload of rock stars and other curious characters, you'd think the spectacle of it all would overshadow the book's business patois. Menn attempts, valiantly, to do so, but it's still evident that All the Rave is a long-handed exercise in business reporting rather than a drama-filled account. There is little surprise in the overarching Napster story because most readers will know how the story ends before cracking open the front cover.

If you're still committed to All the Rave, the best reading takes place in two separate sections: the first on the peer-to-peer program's incubation, and the second on Napster's attempt to take on the well-muscled music industry.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Menn introduces Shawn Fanning, an unassuming high school kid who comes from humble beginnings. Though his life doesn't exactly make for a Horatio Alger story, it's interesting to see how Shawn stops pursuing a sports scholarship for college and instead focuses on computer programming.

After his uncle John gives Shawn his first computer, the aw-shucks kid from Massachusetts comes across a brilliant idea, peer-to-peer file sharing, which he develops with the help of friends in several online communities. The story is touching, and it's fascinating to take a behind-the-scenes look at how the program originated, first through Shawn and then as the product of a tight-knit online community.

Techies of all stripes will be amused as Menn attempts to make computer programming jargon edible to the mainstream reader. Just imagine explaining terms like IRC and warez to your grandma, and you'll have a good idea of the language in these beginning chapters. Despite a few cornball explanations, however, it's still refreshing to see past Napster's media hype and to see Napster for what it started as: a labor of love created by a kid who wanted nothing more than to take advantage of the online universe.

Following chapters barrel through the company's beginnings, dedicating much space to vilifying John Fanning, who seems to deserve every bit of consternation the reading public can muster. After the shock of the elder Fanning's behavior wears off, however, you'll find yourself dragging through painfully detailed accounts of acquiring executive and meetings with skeptical venture capitalists. Anyone who isn't utilizing All the Rave as a handbook on how not to run a business can skip to Chapter 7, in which Menn shifts the book's focus to Napster's delicate dance with the music industry. It's a Davey and Goliath tale for the 21st century. To accent the vastness of the undertaking, Menn dishes out a brief history of the music biz, offering such a compelling analysis of the Napster/music industry camps that it could easily be expanded to fill an entirely different book.

If you don't want to read at all, you can simply look at the pretty pictures midway through the book. Talk about a yearbook: there are pictures of Shawn's hacker pals, a photo of a wilting Lars Ullrich from Metallica, Jack Valenti and other corporate clowns, smiling like there was something to be happy about.

And maybe there was. In the end, Menn shows how Napster was, like other dot-coms, "little more than a publicly supported pyramid scheme, built on the long-true presumption that an even dumber investor was just down the road."

If you want a solid study on copyright law and running a business, Menn's read will not disappoint. If you're looking for a fluffy piece of literature that will keep you awake into the wee hours, try the one with the bespectacled boy on the cover. You probably know the one I'm talking about -- Harry something or other...

You can purchase All the Rave from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Napster will be remembered as brilliant

[192939495969798999]

I can't think of a better way to find out about a new band than on Napster (the way it was). I heard about numerous bands that I would have had no exposure to otherwise. While I think it is wrong to steal people's work, I think it is really important for music to circulate to its audience -- If Napster could sell ads, why couldn't they just use that to pay royalties? Besides, for the 999th time, no one is paying 18 bucks for a CD with one good song on it.

Shawn's computer pals

[GuyMannDude]

After his uncle John gives Shawn his first computer, the aw-shucks kid from Massachusetts comes across a brilliant idea, peer-to-peer file sharing, which he develops with the help of friends in several online communities. The story is touching, and it's fascinating to take a behind-the-scenes look at how the program originated, first through Shawn and then as the product of a tight-knit online community.

Did the members of this "tight-knit online community" become employees of Napster Inc. or did Shawn just ditch them once he realized just how big a thing p2p could be? I'm not trolling, I'm asking. I don't recall Shawn giving a lot of public thanks to his computer buddies during Napster's hayday.

GMD

Bring on the MPAA / RIAA discussions..

[saintjab]

And the book isn't even about that. It's more of a post-mortem business analysis; and could/would prove very handy to someone looking to get into internet ventures. This is a great idea becaues it may help to broaden the pulic's (Joe Sixpack's) understanding of what is going on with all this online P2P contreversy stuff. It could prove very beneficial to the cause of P2P supporters; while maybe shedding some light on just how corrupt the music industries tactics can be. I think this is great idea for a book and there should be more like them.

Re:Wha???

[GuyMannDude]

But on to the topic at hand -- um... I really never used Napster. I tried once and found that it didn't really have much worth downloading. Napster was good if you only wanted the top-40 of the day and didn't care if you got a song that was mislabeled, corrupted, incomplete or otherwise not worth a normal person's time.

Really? I always thought it was pretty good at helping me find obscure stuff I never would have thought of. I remember being bored one time and doing a search for "Star Trek" audio files. It popped up with a song named "Futile (Star Trek mix)" by a band named "Velvet Acid Christ". The Star Trek reference was because the song contained numerous samples from the ST:TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds" dealing with Picard's abduction by the Borg. I listened to the song and thought it was pretty cool. So I started looking around for more info on this band.

Needless to say, I would have never even heard of Velvet Acid Christ if it wasn't for Napster and the ability to search for any keyword whatsoever.

GMD

Re:Wha???

[GuyMannDude]

No shit. livegoats just made it to my foes list. What a moron.

That opening blurb just reeked of the same amateurish journalistic style as Katz. I don't see why he felt it necessary to make such a sweeping, rediculous and borderline insulting statement to start his review. Is it to try to convince us that Napster was some kind of important historical phenomenon and, therefore, we should read this review of a book about it? And if we didn't use Napster we were infants in diapers? Please. That kind of nonsense is not the way to start off any kind of article. That's pretty much the same kind of statement as Katz' "We can all agree that Columbine has changed the way that every single human being on the planet thinks about public education."

Story submitters: it's not necessary to try to place your articles in a larger context. We can do that for ourselves.

GMD

Napster is long dead, Opennap lives on.

[Wally_bear]

Sure, it's not as big as Napster in its heyday, or even Music City (running Opennap) before the traitors went to other things, but Opennap is still alive and kicking, I exclusively do my downloading from Opennap and Slavanap (ugh) servers.

As someone already mentioned (fairly cluelessly however) that WinMX is "napster like", it's connecting to Opennap servers and they likely don't even realize it.

Lopster and Lopster for windows are two clients I suggest, given your preferred OS (not sure what to suggest for Mac honestly..)

Sure, irc trading has gone on for years, BitTorrent recently, but at least on Opennap you can also chat and have some sort of knit community outside of a Forum.

Re:What's the appeal

[Jucius Maximus]

"I never understood the appeal of Napster. I tried to use it a few times, but the signal to noise ratio was so pathetic it wasn't worth the effort. Nice try, interesting concept, largely unusable in my experience."

This is why I love bittorrent. It's not one large searchable network but the signal to noise ratio is extremely good. I have never gotten anything that was mislabelled and the actual quality of what you download is really high. And if you go to one of the 'torrent sites' you can search a large number of back-archives of old torrents, effectively creating a lot of searchable mini-torrent networks. Different sites specialise in different thigns: Apps, Movies, Music, Anime, Pr0n, etc. And no, I will not overload my favourite sites by providing links here. Go an google for them.

The other great thing about bittorrent is that there is a lot more 'sharing ethics' in the community. People seed files using their own bandwidth just for the heck of it, they don't just download and disconnect. One 2 GB Anime chunk I finished downloading 10 hours ago is still seeding on my machine because I want to help other people get it. I would have have shared something like that on Napster or Kazaa.