Internet Underground Music Archive

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was the pioneer of online music.[1] IUMA was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993[2], for the purpose of providing a venue for unsigned artists to share their music and communicate with their audience. IUMA's goal was to help independent artists use the Internet to distribute their music to fans while circumventing the usual distribution model of using a record company.

IUMA originally existed on Usenet newsgroups, before the World Wide Web was widely used. On March 9, 1994 CNN featured IUMA in their "Showbiz News" segment.[3]

IUMA provided artists who registered with a free URL and web page. The artists could present their music over the Internet in stream, download, and internet radio format. Further, it provided an easy-to-use home page for the band and the ability to distribute their music with no bandwidth fees. Some of the original file formats used to encode the music were WAV, AIFF and MP2. MP3 was added later as that format became more popular.

Interesting extras included a "charts" section where bands were tracked by how many people visited their page and downloaded their music. At one point, IUMA was sending royalty checks to bands.

In 2000, IUMA offered US$5,000 to couples who named their baby "Iuma". Several families took up the offer.[4]

Early in 2006, the IUMA website disappeared from the Internet. The site had already been closed to new submissions since 2001, when funding was lost.[5]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Maurer, Wendy. THE DYNAMICS OF MUSIC DISTRIBUTION. Retrieved on 2008-04-21.
  2. ^ David Pescovitz. "It's All Geek to Them; Digital Communes Find a Social Scene in Computers", Business section, The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION, Los Angeles Times, 1995-08-30, p. 1. Retrieved on 2008-04-21. Archived from the original on 1995-08-30. "...27-year-old Jon Luini, who co-founded the hip Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) in 1993" 
  3. ^ Boucher, Robert. IUMA on CNN (3/9/1994). Retrieved on 2008-04-29.
  4. ^ It's a boy.com! (article on Iuma Dylan-Lucas Thornhill). BBC (2000-08-17). Retrieved on 2006-09-28.
  5. ^ IUMA ceases operations. CD Baby (2001-02-07). Retrieved on 2006-06-28.

[edit] External links