Sheet Music

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

Crown Business, 368 pp., $25

There's probably not an online music user out there who doesn't either miss Napster or regret never getting a chance to. It was more than just the ease of use and the enormous musical library available, it was the signpost of an era. An era in which you and me and Joe PC suddenly became both tech-stock day traders and digital-music Svengalis, giving and taking hundreds of MP3s at will, intellectual property and the record industry be damned. Nothing reflected the high-adrenaline climate of the end-of-the-millennium Internet boom better than Napster, a company founded by a quiet 18-year-old kid, Shawn Fanning, that eventually had 40 million registered users and zero practical stream of income. In All the Rave, Los Angeles Times tech writer Joseph Menn delves into the history of the company and the colorful characters behind it. Stories of nervous breakdowns, Ecstacy, rooftop pot smoking, and interoffice affairs are sprinkled into a mostly blow-by-blow account of the history of the company, its financial and legal woes, and its fickle leaders, who like many in those Net-crazy days, bungled chance after chance to sell high. The chief culprit was Fanning's uncle John Fanning, who wrested 70% of the company away from his trusting nephew at the very beginning. All the Rave reads at times like an exposé on John Fanning, who lengthened his long pre-Napster history of unsavory and unethical business decisions by time and time again blocking moves that would bolster the company financially and strategically. Menn shies away from offering much in the way of perspective or prognostication on the larger pictures of digital-music distribution and file sharing, leaving the meticulously researched All the Rave a detailed, face-value account of an unforgettable intersection of technology, money, and music that took 40 million pairs of ears along for the ride.