“..The origins of the online music revolution are back – thanks to internet archivist extraordinaire Jason Scott.
Scott, who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, has resurrected the Internet Underground Music Archive – or IUMA as the kids called it back in 1992 – when they were uploading songs via Gopher.
Started at the University of California at Santa Cruz by Jeff Patterson, Jon Luini and Rob Lord, the IUMA’s goal was to create an online music archive for unsigned musicians and bands.
The idea was simple: Bands uploaded files and sent them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail.
And just like that, the internet music revolution was born.
The IUMA site eventually came to host thousands of bands and hundreds of thousands of songs – many in MP2 and other long-since-abandoned audio formats.
Like so many other sites of that era, IUMA was eventually sold off during the dot-com boom years to a series of clueless owners -
- who let the site die a slow death of neglect until it was shut down completely in 2006 -
- (hmm, why does that sound so familiar?)..”
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The ‘Internet Underground Music Archive’ Rides Again | Webmonkey | Wired.com.
