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

Wha???

[GuyMannDude]

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.

When the hell did Jon Katz start submitting slashdot articles again?

GMD

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

Decent book review

[preric]

I've already read this, and would say that's a pretty decent review, once you get around the fact that you just PAID for a book about napster

Re:Decent book review

[reallocate]

Maybe you oughta shoplift it. After all, that was the napster business plan.

Re:Decent book review

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the library. Yanno the library (a govt. institution) has a lot in common with Napster. In fact considering the only reason you need to return a book to the library is so that other people can use it (same thing as sharing the file after you've d/led it) I'd say the library is quite the file sharing program. Too bad the library doesn't bring the books to your house.

M.D. Inc

Re:Decent book review

[Surak]

I've already read this, and would say that's a pretty decent review, once you get around the fact that you just PAID for a book about napster

I just got it off of Kazaa!

wolves?

[sporty]

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.

Or using ftp, irc or usenet. Or not using them at all.

I prefer whole albums myself. Napster never made that easy.

Ahh the good old days...

[mtrupe]

Its such a shame how we cannot get free music anymore now that Napster is dead. Err, uh. Nevermind.

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

Re:Shawn's computer pals

[dr ttol]

Yeah. One of them is Jordan Ritter who is also a co-founder. He actually did all the backend server stuff. He's now over at Cloudmark doing the SpamNet thing, which is pretty big. And yes, I did some stuff for Napster. Jordan rules by the way.

Re:Napster? Feh.

[tuffy]

I consider the copying of music and other digital media to which I do not own the copyright or to which I have not been given the express permission by the owner of said copyright to be theft.

I consider wandering off with a CD I haven't paid for to be theft. I consider downloading songs I haven't paid for and don't have permission to download copyright infringement, because that's what it is. I don't consider either to be acceptable, but neither to I consider both of them to be identical.

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.

Actually, I never liked Napster.

[mcc]

Except for a very very small block of time RIGHT before they shut down (during which time they were quite enjoyable to use and featured a wide variety of music) Napster always struck me as having shitty, uber-mainstream selection, annoying users, download speeds that seemed to almost always drop to 0.2k/s or just drop altogether once the file was half-downloaded, a total of zero users who were correctly reporting their (modem or cable?) download type, and an absolutely horrid (at least at first) macintosh implementation. Moreover, finding a full album on napster was absolutely impossible, badly encoded mp3s were everywhere, and WELL, WELL over half of all mp3s available on napster were incompletes-- but NONE were labelled as such.

I hated napster.

I spent the entire Napster period downloading mp3s, just as i had for a very very long time before Napster was ever invented-- from search.oth.net and other FTP-search based sources. Yeah, Ratio was a bitch, but at least you KNEW the server was going to stay up for a few hours at least, and you knew nobody was going to put an mp3 in their main collection if it was an incomplete.

Also, there was this convenient thing in that basically, the majority of ftp servers had a 1:5 U/D ratio set; the vast majority of ftp servers had exactly one file that i wanted to download of about 6 or 7 megabytes; and i had an mp3 of cookie monster singing "C is for Cookie, that's good enough for me" that was 1.5 megabytes. So i could zap up cookie monster, grab what i wanted, and get out quick. What was wierd, though, was that i think i started something; once i started doing this, the cookie monster mp3 started spreading quite a bit. I would sign onto mp3 servers i'd never been on before and find my cookie monster mp3 already there-- and not in the upload folder either, in the actual sorted mp3 collection. Hmmmm.. ^_^

Uh, and since i see to be admitting to illegal acts above: i downloaded mp3s solely to sample music which i was considering buying or which was not available in america, i was too young to be legally tried as an adult when the events described above happened, i never downloaded mp3s, this post is fiction posted for humorous purposes, i don't even know what an "mp3" is, and i don't own or know how to use a computer.

Oh, and slashdot claims that this is my 700th post posted with my account, though i notice a lot of my earlier ones aren't in the archive.

It's a Davey and Goliath tale for the 21st century

[haa...jesus christ]

Uh, you should probably say 'David and Goliath'. 'Davey and Goliath' connotes Napster users as button-down Christians and the music industry as a big dumb dog.

Okay, it's half right.

Re:Culture maven

[e2d2]

So you only stole files a few times? Hey I only beat a few people up so I'm clean like you..

The other sick depraved bastards stealing music from the mouths of those poor music industry blue-collar types. Not us though, me and you are the last of our type.

puh-lease

[j4ck50n]

"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."

No self respecting geek would use Napster EVER, no one I know ever touched it, and we all downloaded MP3's *like a champ*.

It's called usenet...premium servers please. All of us *in the know* knew that once Napster went under, and it most definitely would, that all the kids hyped up on *free* would be flocking to usenet, flooding the groups with crap posts, begging for instructions and calling everyone *fag*. Sure enough, they did.

Napster single handedly brought piracy to the masses, made it a household word and brought the ire of RIAA etc. upon us all.

I cant believe that this story was intro'd like this. Napster is, was and always will be a blight and a bad bad period in mine and others opinions.

"...in diapers..." man, gimma a freekin break.

Napster--Quintessentially Dot-bomb?

[istartedi]

Pitchman: I have a 19-year old programmer who wants to promote a system that distributes other people's copyrighted works and will probably give rise to all kinds of troublesome legal issues, but he does it on the Internet so it's really cutting edge.

VC: Here's a truckload of money.