Napster's Autopsy: Tracing a Music Rebel's Rise and Fall

“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.” Brad Stone reviews Joseph Menn‘sAll the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning‘sNapster. Menn argues that it was actually the greed and thuggery of young Shawn’s shady uncle and buisiness partner John Fanning who doomed millions of teenagers to (sometimes) have to fork over money for their music. —Napster’s Autopsy: Tracing a Music Rebel’s Rise and FallM$NBC)