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

1 The Rebels The rave in Oakland captured Napster as it was just coming into its own at the center of the Web boom's insanity and on the way to becoming the fastest-growing use of the Internet. The sometimes painful story of the quiet young man at the heart of the company began at another, far different party twenty years earlier, on the other side of the country. It was in a ramshackle old house in the hard-luck town of Rockland, Massachusetts, south of Boston. The sprawling home was barely big enough to contain the eight brothers and sisters of the Fanning brood, a diverse and struggling Irish family that this night invited half the neighborhood over to celebrate Eddie Fanning's high school graduation. The Fannings loved music and a raucous good time, and they had arranged for a band of local renown to play. MacBeth performed songs by better-known Boston rockers Aerosmith and sang its own material, even recording a 45 single. Coleen Fanning, sixteen, was especially impressed with the band and with eighteen-year-old Attleboro guitarist Joe Rando in particular. Hundreds of friends and neighbors showed up to enjoy the night. The next oldest after Coleen in the family, fourteen-year-old John Fanning, passed a hat and collected thousands of dollars to pay for the bash, his first entrepreneurial experience. The band became part of the Fannings' social circle, and in time Coleen began dating Rando, who was smart, good-looking, and from a wealthier family. A couple of years later, after Coleen told Rando that she was pregnant, their romance ended. She kept the baby, and the young Shawn Fanning joined the already-overstuffed household in 1980, which moved soon to nearby Brockton. The first few years "were hell," according to Coleen, a small, freckled, blue-eyed woman who laughs a lot and speaks with a pronounced Boston accent. She moved from one tough area to another, then married an ex-Marine and truck driver named Raymond Verrier. The couple had four more children, and it wasn't the happiest of homes. "Money was always a pretty big issue," Shawn said. "There was a lot of tension around that." They lived near Brockton's projects for a time, and Coleen could see her already-shy son withdrawing from what he saw happening around him. "He went inside himself real deep and said, 'I want to get out of this.' Even though it meant losing him a little bit, it's what I wanted for him," said Coleen, who was working then as a nurse's aide. During a split between the Verriers, when Shawn was about twelve, he and his siblings had to move for several months into a foster home until the couple reconciled. Always a strong student, Shawn tried to escape by concentrating on school and by playing guitar, basketball, and baseball. When the family was through the worst of the hardship, the Verriers moved to the small middle-class town of Harwich Port, on the elbow of Cape Cod. The new house was nice enough, if still crowded, and the neighborhood was full of pine trees and songbirds. As Shawn kept playing sports, his mother encouraged him, thinking the whole time about scholarships to college. Shawn was especially strong at baseball, even though fear gripped him at each trip to the plate. He batted over .650 one year at Harwich High School, a small school with some very good teachers. As Shawn grew, Coleen wanted to give him more than she had had, more than she could give him directly. "We don't have much," she said. "He didn't get a lot of things that people get who come from money." She saw that Shawn was motivated, and she turned to the person she knew best who could be a mentor of sorts, her business-minded brother John. John Fanning gave Shawn money for each A he brought home, and there were many. And he bought Shawn his first computer, an Apple Macintosh the Verriers could never have afforded. Shawn took to it immediately. Often he would be oMenn, Joseph is the author of 'All the Rave The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster', published 2003 under ISBN 9780609610930 and ISBN 0609610937.