The Internet Underground Music Archive was established in November 1993 by Robert Lord and Jeff Patterson, two students of the University of Santa Cruz who met on the Internet, and who were joined by Jon Luini, a musician who was in four bands at the time. Keen musicians themselves, the aim of the project was to promote unsigned bands by offering information to the world in the form of text, scanned band photographs and downloadable sound files . Utilising cutting edge technology at a time when the music establishment was firmly against electronic delivery, and proclaiming "the future of music distribution " [14], IUMA created for themselves an immense high profile in the media that began with the San Jose Mercury News in November 1993 and grew to include some of the most respected outlets in the US - Time, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Rolling Stone.
IUMA 's aims were clear –
to change music distribution as we know it. Even if IUMA don"t accomplish this task, at least we are showing people that free distribution over long ranges without an actual material product is possible. We are showing that bands with little commercial appeal, and no money, can now reach thousands (actually, millions) of people who might be potential fans. [14]
Music was submitted to IUMA free of charge, and encoded using MPEG technology. A media kit of the band was then constructed, which included a text file of the band's biography, product ordering and contact details, a bitmap of the product's artwork, usually between 40 and 70Kb in size, and up to five minutes of digitised music. The process of preparing sound files for the Internet included
sampling with 64x over-sampling -89dB SNR sound digitiser at 44.1kHz in stereo (that's true CD quality), then compressed from 13.7:1 to 6:1, depending on the original's sound quality, using the MPEG sound compression standard. [15]
The resulting sound files were between 1Mb and 5Mb in size, with a mono recording half the size of its stereo equivalent.
The entire package would be between 1 and 5Mb in size, with the average song around 2 or 3Mb.These details could be downloaded by anyone with Internet access and listened to using special decoding software which could also be downloaded free of charge from IUMA 's site.
The company began as an ftp (file transfer protocol) site where the text, audio and image files were available for downloading separately, but in keeping with IUMA 's use of new technologies, a World Wide Web site was soon developed, accessible via the Web's first navigator/browser, Mosaic . Mosaic allowed IUMA to create an user-friendlier graphical interface between music fans and the company's featured bands. Though Mosaic offered none of the advanced page layout features which became standard with the development of Hypertext Mark-up Language - background colour, text wrapping, borders, tables, forms - it did offer an aesthetically-pleasing site that became a definitive point of contact for music fans connected to the Internet.
As the Internet grew in popularity and unsigned bands sold more products due to their inclusion on IUMA 's site; the company developed their site and extended their services.
Homepage of the Internet Underground Music Archive
There are now links to other services for unsigned bands, such as an A&R service which links to major labels, the Berger Joint - an exposition magazine for IUMA 's featured bands, and a sound library which has grown considerably over the past five years. Inclusion on IUMA 's site was originally free, though a donation was suggested. Eventually, IUMA began charging a fee for the service, starting at $20, then $70, and has now reached $240 for their basic service. This includes one song, up to two pages of text, two images and online merchandising capability, as well as some optional extras. As well as the original MPEG format, sound files are now available from IUMA 's site in Liquid Audio, Real Audio and uncompressed digital audio (.au) formats.
The problems encountered by IUMA along the way were the same as those encountered by anyone who was to dabble in electronic distribution of music over the Internet, and led to the music establishment frowning upon this new technology and dismissing the Internet as a passing fad. The main problems with distributing music on the Internet were summarised by Billboard in an article on IUMA in February 1994 -
- "There are limitations to the Internet . The system is notoriously difficult to navigate, and because no-one is actually in charge of the network, there appears to be no effort to make it more user-friendly."
- "There are technical limitations...It can take as long as thirty minutes to transfer a three-minute song over phone lines, depending on the connection and the user's equipment."
- There were also "problems with the protection and payment of copyright holders. In an attempt to side-step the establishment, Lord and Patterson have walked into a minefield of legal questions that are just now coming to the fore in the copyright community". (Billboard, February 1994.)
Back: Early attempts at digital music delivery | Contents | Next: The Bulletin Board System