Dotmusic

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Dotmusic was a music website that existed as a stand alone website from June 1995 to December 2003. Initially intended as the web compliment to the UK music industry trade magazine Music Week, the site was relaunched in December 1998 as a website for music fans.

In addition to music news, reviews, and chart commentary, Dotmusic included one of the earliest pay download music services, Dotmusic On Demand. It was also famous for its discussion forum, one of the most popular and active message boards in the UK^{[citation needed]} in the years around the turn of the Millennium. As well as forums devoted to various artists, there was a free-for-all, off-topic, forum called Dotmusic Lite, known as DotLite for short.

Regular posters on the forums - DotLiters - were celebrated in the Top 100 Posters Chart, the regular DotRate threads and in comedic parody songs by occasional poster Jon. A number of DotCons - conventions for Dotmusic users - were held in cities around the UK from 1999 onwards. The site was also famous for it's ongoing feuds between posters particuarly involving the Tranny Trinity.

Dotmusic was originally owned by Miller Freeman, before being sold to BT in 2002. In 2003 the site was sold to Yahoo! and subsequently incorporated into Yahoo!'s UK based music portal, UK Launch. Whilst some features of Dotmusic remain, namely the music news pages (and news archive), the weekly charts and chart commentary by James Masterton, the most popular feature of Dotmusic, the community message boards were closed. In 2004 it was announced that the main Dotmusic site had shut down for good and was no more.

Rather than just abandon the little internet society they helped create, though, several members of the dotmusic forums got together and created a safety net of "Refugee" forums for the membership to migrate to, hoping to keep most (or at least good chunks) of everyone together. In 2006, these communities still exist, with former dotmusic posters being joined by new members. The sites, a combination of artist forums like Madonnanation and music forums like Moopy, are linked by a network site also established in 2004.

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