MP3Lizard

» see mp3lizard.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2000, if you wanted an MP3 and did not already know where it was, one of the ways you found it was an FTP indexer. People ran file servers with the directories left open and search engines crawled them, so what you got back was a list of paths pointing at somebody's machine in a university somewhere. MP3Lizard launched that year doing exactly that. It was built by AfterDawn, a Finnish site out of Oulu that had opened in June 1999 and had decided that explaining MP3 to people was a thing worth doing full time.

Then Napster happened and the indexer lost its reason to exist. Anybody could now find any song in four seconds without a path on a stranger's FTP server, so in 2001 AfterDawn moved all of its music material onto MP3Lizard and turned the site into something else: a place where unsigned musicians uploaded their own songs and anybody could download them for nothing. The lizard stayed in the logo. The job changed completely.

That version worked for a while and then stopped being necessary too. Artists who wanted to be heard went to MySpace, and after that to Facebook, and the business of hosting a stranger's demo stopped being a service anyone had to provide. AfterDawn kept MP3Lizard up anyway. The last time anybody modified the code was 2005.

It stayed up like that for fourteen more years. On 24 January 2019 Petteri Pyyny, who had founded AfterDawn in the first place, wrote the shutdown notice under a headline that translates as "the end of an era." His stated reasons were daily visitor numbers you could count on the fingers of one hand and a codebase nobody had looked at since 2005, which he called a hazard after fifteen years of neglect.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ftp years ~

The FTP-indexing era of music search has almost no monuments left, partly because the sites were ugly and partly because what they indexed was mostly illegal. The mechanism is worth remembering anyway. There was a window of two or three years when finding music online meant finding a machine, and the machine belonged to a person who had forgotten to close a port. Search engines like MP3Lizard's first version were reading the accidental generosity of badly configured servers.

That is also why the pivot in 2001 makes sense as more than a business decision. AfterDawn's whole identity was technical explanation for people doing legally awkward things with media, and the moment peer-to-peer arrived, an FTP crawler looked antique. Moving the brand onto music that was actually free to give away was the version of the site that could survive the decade.

~ the long quiet ~

Fourteen years of no maintenance is an unusual thing to admit in public, and it is the most honest detail in the notice. Abandonment implies a decision, and there is no sign anybody ever made one here; the site simply stopped coming up. The server kept answering and the artist pages kept resolving, and for fourteen years running the cost of leaving it alone stayed lower than the cost of thinking about it. Meanwhile the parent site became the largest IT site in Finland by audience and went on publishing news every day in two languages.

~ the funny part ~

The site did not fully leave when it was announced dead. Archive Team noted two days later that the homepage and the artist profiles had started redirecting to AfterDawn, while essentially all the actual content was still reachable through alternative URLs. Two separate grabs went in that month, one covering the English site and one covering both the English and the Finnish versions, and both ended up in the Wayback Machine.

Pyyny closed the notice with a line about every era ending in its turn and the clock refusing to run backward. The site's last code change predated the iPhone by two years, so the era in question had been over for most of the site's life.

~ where i was for this ~

AfterDawn was part of my internet. Around 2003 to 2006, if you were ripping a DVD in Turkey or trying to work out why a codec pack had broken every video on your machine, you ended up on afterdawn.com. Its English edition was pulling close to five million readers a month by 2010, and the guides were better than anything the software vendors wrote. I read that site for years without ever once clicking through to MP3Lizard, which turns out to be the normal experience: a sister site that the parent kept alive long after the audience had quietly stopped arriving.

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