Review:'All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster'

Last update: April 19, 2003 - 11:00 PM

NONFICTION

All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster

By: Joseph Menn. Publisher: Crown, 352 pages, $25. Review: A fascinating account of the sudden rise and precipitous fall of Napster, the free music-downloading service.

Reviewed by Chris Riemenschneider

Star Tribune Staff Writer

Writers will be picking over the wreckage of the dot-com boom and bust for years to come, if for no other reason than to make up for the money that many of them lost in tech stocks. Los Angeles Times business reporter Joseph Menn, however, makes a fascinating case study out of -- and essentially closes the books on -- music-downloading pioneer Napster.

"All the Rave" thoroughly chronicles Napster's sudden rise in the late 1990s and its equally quick (but more foreseeable) fall in July 2001.

At least to techies, it's hard to overstate the company's relevance. At its peak, a few months before being shut down in federal court, the music-swapping Web service was believed to have as many as 70 million users who flocked to the site to download songs or even entire CDs for free. Napster's success had the $40 billion music industry in a state of frenzy, which it arguably hasn't gotten over yet.

Menn notes that Napster differed from other skyrocketing dot-coms because its product/service was unique, and because the copyright issues it raised were unprecedented. But at the same time, he writes, "[Napster] epitomized what went wrong at the hottest spot in capitalism . . . at the turn of the century."

To most people, the Napster story might read like a morass of technologies, legalities and corporate entities. Menn does a good job of explaining the complexities without dumbing anything down or lessening the book's edge, which is sharpened by accounts of greed and lots and lots of flagrant ignorance.

Menn uses the company's teenage co-founder, Shawn Fanning, as the main human element to counterbalance all the corporations and legal maneuvering. Fanning's story certainly is human, too, as he goes from a working-class, broken home in Massachusetts to a rich -- albeit confused -- California existence in a little over two years.

There are plenty of other players besides Fanning. A string of money-and/or power-hungry investors and executives came on board with the company. Other big names lined up against it, such as Metallica, Eminem and Peter Gabriel.

In terms of new reporting, "All the Rave's" most revealing passages deal with Fanning's uncle, John Fanning, who originally held a majority of the stock in the company and was desperate to play more than a minor role in it. A shady businessman, according to Menn, Fanning ultimately tarnished Napster's image while trying to underplay his nephew's position in the company.

Shawn was consistently pushed out front as the company's poster boy, Menn reports. After all, what evil corporation would risk the PR pitfalls of attacking a teenager's dream come true? As it turned out, plenty did.

Chris Riemenschneider is atchrisr@startribune.com

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