Internet Underground Music Archive

» see iuma.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

iuma sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. november 1993 in santa cruz, before i was online, before audio on the web was reasonable for anyone. three uc santa cruz students, rob lord and jeff patterson and jon luini, set up a sun workstation and started letting unsigned bands upload mp2 files. that is the founding fact. the internet underground music archive was the first place where a band that had not signed a label deal could put music on a server and have a stranger anywhere download it.

by the time i got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in turkey, iuma was three years into being a known site for indie music, but it was not a site i ever loaded. there was no mp3 culture in turkish dial-up homes yet. that came later, around 2002, when internet cafes had broadband and napster was already gone. by then iuma had been bought by emusic in june 1999 and the original santa cruz culture was over.

vitaminic, the italian online music company, bought iuma from emusic in 2002. submissions had closed in 2001 already. the site coasted on its archive for four more years. in early 2006 the domain stopped resolving. there was no shutdown announcement. it just went away. in 2012 jason scott and john gilmore at the internet archive pulled what they could from the dead servers and put it in a permanent archive. that is where the surviving thirty-five-thousand-odd bands live now.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

iuma was the working answer to the question of what the web was for, asked in 1993 when nobody really knew. unsigned bands got a free url and a free page and free hosting for their songs. that was the whole offer. no advertising, no rights deal, no contract, no charge. you uploaded an mp2 or later an mp3 and people could stream or download it.

this is more radical than it sounds now. in 1993 the standard way to get a band's music heard was a label deal, or failing that a copied cassette traded in person. iuma proposed that the public internet, before the web had real audio standards, could be a distribution channel. they were right. the wider music industry got there in 1999 with napster, then by 2003 with the itunes store. iuma had spent the intervening decade being right about the format and slightly off about who would profit.

~ the names you heard there ~

most of the thirty-five thousand bands on iuma never reached a wider audience. some did. aerosmith put a track up in 1994 as a publicity experiment, the first major-label song available as a legal mp3 download on the web. they might be giants used iuma during their "people are wrong" era. an iuma "music-o-mania" contest in the late 90s flew the winners to san francisco to play with primus. for a few years the site mattered to the kind of band that would later release on bandcamp.

the 2000 baby-naming stunt, where iuma offered five thousand dollars to a family that named their newborn "iuma", is the dot-com-bust memory most people have of the site. four families took the deal. some of those kids would be in their mid-twenties now.

~ what it became ~

everything iuma did, bandcamp does better. free band pages, direct downloads, optional payment, optional streaming. soundcloud does a different shape of the same idea. youtube took the music-discovery layer for a separate generation. iuma was the proof of concept. the actual permanent home for the music that lived on iuma is the internet archive, where the collection still loads, in slightly broken html, with mp3 links that mostly still play.

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