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...

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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.

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

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

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.

not me

[Jucius Maximus]

"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."

Or on dialup. 28.8 dialup. On a 5 machine home LAN.

It is painful living in a rural area, there's still no broadband.

Re:Decent book review

[reallocate]

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

All the rave...

[ihatesco]

are belong to us.

You strike me as....

[Anonymous Coward]

one of those people who just make this statement to appear "uber". Was the signal-to-noise ratio really that bad? Only on really bad and/or low encodings have I ever been able to hear the differnce. Then the is there fact that I am willing to accept some quality loss when listening on my computer. I know I can get better (maybe even cheap) speakers, but I don't really want to. When I want to hear a good recording of Muddy Watters I break out the wax. I feel the urge to go on some more and some more facts and figures and details, then I realized I fell for you troll and am so ashamed that I will post this in a cowardly fashion.

Regretfully Yours,

AC

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.

Humbug

[Jahf]

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.

Or maybe you were just a conscientious person who instead of ripping off your favorite artists (yes, they do get SOME of that money, just not much) were buying their discs and ripping them from legitimately purchased media and thereby also helping make sure that the labels saw how much they were selling.

Now porn on the other hand ...

Re:Wha???

[daeley]

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

Let's see...User number over 600000 and no comments. Hey, it could be Jon Katz in disguise! ;)

WTF?

[Chasuk]

Methinks Mr. Livegoat needs to put away the thesaurus when he is writing a book review, at least until the words it recommends fit comfortably within his own vocabulary.

... dedicating much space to vilifying John Fanning, who seems to deserve every bit of consternation the reading public can muster.

The word you wanted was condemnation, Mr. Livegoat. Consternation is the rough equivalent of confusion, which doesn't fit the context of your sentence at all.

Techies of all stripes will be amused as Menn attempts to make computer programming jargon edible to the mainstream reader.

Edible? Try intelligible.

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.

Patois, which means roughly the same thing as jargon or lingo, is nonsensical in this sentence. The spectacle of rock stars overshadows jargon? Really?

An informative review, if one can overlook these bloopers.

Re:Decent book review

[fobbman]

If we did steal the book, would Crown Publishing Group start printing up versions of the book with the lone phrase "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" printed repeatedly in it?

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.

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!

Re:WTF?

[Halloween Jack]

"Self-respecting culture mavens" can't be bothered with petty things like understanding the twenty-dollar words that they throw into reviews. See, "livegoat"'s email points back to gamegal.com, which is, like, this game review site, OK, but, see, it's, like, for gals! Or written by a gal. Or something. Let's look at their profiles page [gamegal.com], shall we?

Atchly, looks like "Libe Goad" is a real person, according to their site, and helped make kozmo.com the success that it is today. And she has degrees in Journalism and English Literature, so she must be qualified to be an editor. So there.

Re:Decent book review

[_Sprocket_]

If we did steal the book, would Crown Publishing Group start printing up versions of the book with the lone phrase "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" printed repeatedly in it?

I downloaded "All_The_Rave_-_Joseph Menn(OCR,PR.V.1.0).pdf" and all it was just 863K of the phrase "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" repeated again and again. Maybe someone OCR'd the wrong book.

Or it might have been Madonna's little known SEX2 book.