Los Angeles Times reporter Joseph Menn’s “All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster” provides the best seat yet to the online music revolution. In 1999, Fanning, a 19-year-old Boston-area hacker from a broken home, stumbled on the idea for making digital MP3 files easy to find on the Net. Teaming up with fellow geeks he knew only through online chat rooms, he crafted a simple technology that allowed millions to swap music collections free of charge. The operation moved to Silicon Valley that same year, where MTV and other media outlets converted the hackers into heroes, until the music industry squashed the company in court.
Menn’s revelations are startling. Fanning’s ruffian uncle, John Fanning, actually conned his vulnerable nephew into handing over 70 percent of the company right at the outset. Later, Napster secretly paid musicians like rapper Chuck D to publicly support file-sharing (say it ain’t so, Chuck). At the end, after execs at the German media giant Bertelsmann tried to save the company–and ruined their own careers in the process–one of the young hackers provided the perfect postscript: “Everyone’s being greedy. We’re all fighting over scraps.”
