PureVolume

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

~ the eulogy ~

i was on the wrong music scene for purevolume. it sat in the warped-tour, hot-topic, sidekick-era american indie world, the one where a band photo was always black and white with eyeliner in it. that world reached turkey through downloads on torrents and the occasional mtv2 segment, not through a band's purevolume page. the closest i got was a friend posting a youtube link of a song he had found on some american emo blog, which probably traced back to purevolume one or two hops upstream.

the site went live on thanksgiving eve 2003 out of the university of massachusetts. mitchell pavao, brett woitunski and nate hudson built it. each artist got a profile with embeddable mp3 streaming, photos and tour dates. an editorial team ran a weekly purepicks list of eight bands the staff wanted you to hear. that list was the thing the platform was actually known for, not the social-network bits. it was small enough that being on it mattered.

the band-by-band lineage is widely cited. gym class heroes became the first band to land a record deal through purevolume when fueled by ramen signed them off the site. paramore, fall out boy, panic at the disco and twenty one pilots all had purevolume eras that overlapped with their pre-fame years. for the scene that listened to those bands, purevolume was where you found them first. it ran on a blue layout that barely changed between 2008 and 2017, the kind of stable design that aged from "current" to "vintage" without anyone touching the css.

the death notice landed on 30 june 2018. spinmedia, which had acquired purevolume in 2010, had been winding down its music properties for years. the music-platform layer that purevolume occupied had already been carved up by spotify on the listener side, soundcloud and bandcamp on the artist side. the site finally went dark with most of the mp3s still hosted but no working uploader to add new ones.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

purevolume came out of the same 2003-2005 window that produced myspace music and last.fm. each took a slightly different cut at the same problem. last.fm scrobbled what you played in winamp. myspace music turned every band into a profile page with a top-eight friends list. purevolume picked the smallest piece: give an unsigned band a clean place to put four mp3s and a tour schedule, then editorialize the discovery layer through purepicks.

that smaller surface area was its early advantage. you went to purevolume when you wanted to find a band on purpose, not when you wanted a profile to bounce off of. by 2005 it was the unofficial farm system for fueled by ramen plus a handful of other warped-tour labels. the orange-era branding from 2003-2007 sat on top-tier indie websites of the time alongside myspace and absolutepunk.

~ the long flat decline ~

spinmedia (originally buzzmedia) bought purevolume in 2010 along with absolutepunk and a stack of other scene properties. the acquisition came right at the inflection point where myspace music stopped being the place teenagers found new bands and the soundcloud/bandcamp split started carving up what was left. spinmedia tried to keep purevolume going as a music-news site with the band uploads still working, but the editorial spend kept getting cut. by 2014 the purepicks list was being phoned in. by 2016 the front page was mostly throwback content about the bands that had already become famous through the site a decade earlier.

~ what got buried with it ~

the platform took down a specific era of unsigned-band internet with it. the four-track mp3 page hosted by the platform itself, with a tour calendar and a guestbook style comments section, was the format every american indie band used between 2004 and 2010. spotify replaced the listener part. bandcamp replaced the artist part. the in-between layer that purevolume had run, where an editorial team curated discovery while the artists kept their own page, did not survive into the streaming era as a working business.

what is left now is screenshots and the wayback machine. a lot of bands that had purevolume pages still exist in wikipedia footnotes that link to dead urls.

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