Neumu

» see neumu.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Neumu went up in June 2001 under the tagline "art + words + music", and the man running it had already done this once. Michael Goldberg came out of Rolling Stone and launched Addicted to Noise on 1 December 1994, the first web music magazine to put audio samples next to its album reviews. That site was sold into SonicNet and then into MTV's online division, and when Goldberg left MTVi in 2000 he started over from nothing with the designer Emme Stone.

The second site was smaller and odder than the first. It ran news, columns, interviews and a review section called 44.1kHz, and it gave some bands their own microsite on its own subdomains. Newsweek called it an artsy oasis of music reviews and culture commentary. Metacritic counted its album scores as a professional source, which for a site that size was the only kind of institutional recognition on offer.

By 2006 the updates had slowed to almost nothing, and Goldberg explained why on the site itself: "In case you're wondering why things slowed down to a crawl at Neumu last year, the answer, in a word (and in a web site), is MOG." He was spending his time on the music social network he had gone to work for. The last thing Neumu ever published was a contributor's list of her favorite records of 2006.

That list can be dated out of the archive without any help from a source. On 27 January 2007 the top of the front page was Jim Connelly's favorite recordings of 2006. By 5 February it was Jenny Tatone's, and Jenny Tatone's is what it stayed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ten-point scale ~

The review section scored albums out of ten, and the published key is the best surviving artifact of the house tone. A 10 was "All-time classic. One of the best albums in the history of recorded music." A 9 was "Perfection. Nirvana. Almost as good as sex." A 2 was "Not even suitable as a coaster to place cold drinks on." A 1 was "Makes you regret that you have ears."

That voice belonged to a specific few years, when people who had been printing in magazines were hand-building sites with no budget behind them. The scale is also a fair description of the operation: a few thousand readers and an editor who answered his own email.

~ the long freeze ~

The dial-up detail is what I notice looking at that front page now. Under the reviews there is a long column of streaming links, RealAudio singles and an entire Jim Jarmusch soundtrack, and in 2001, on the modem I had in Turkey, that column was decoration. You could read what a record sounded like and you could not hear any of it, and the record itself was not on a shelf within a thousand kilometers.

Neumu stopped being updated and did not stop being served. The front page, with its 2006 year-end list and its dead RealAudio links, answered requests for nineteen years and five months. The Internet Archive holds it at around seven kilobytes, near enough byte-identical, every few weeks from 2007 through 23 June 2026. Wikipedia's article still describes the site in the present tense.

Then the hosting ended quietly. As of October 2026 neumu.net resolves to no address at all: the registration is intact and nothing is behind it. The last capture is stamped 22 June 2026, a date printed by the clock script that had been the only part of the site still changing.

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