The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was an organization that provided a venue for
unsigned artists to share their music and communicate with their
audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called "readers"), theatre, music (in which they are called "listeners"), video games (in which they are called "players"), or ...
. IUMA is widely recognized as the birthplace of on-line music. 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 was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the
University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.
IUMA originally existed as
FTP and
Gopher sites, before the
World Wide Web was widely used. On March 9, 1994
CNN featured IUMA in their "Showbiz News" segment. In June 1999, IUMA was purchased by
EMusic, and moved operations from
Santa Cruz to
Redwood City, home of the EMusic offices.
IUMA provided artists who registered with a free
URL
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...
and
web page. The artists could present their music over the
Internet in
stream
A stream is a continuous body of water, body of surface water Current (stream), flowing within the stream bed, bed and bank (geography), banks of a channel (geography), channel. Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a 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.
In 2000, IUMA offered US$5,000 to couples who named their baby "Iuma". Several families took up the offer.
IUMA flourished, hosting events such as "Music-o-mania", the largest online "Battle of the Bands" ever held. The winners were given rock star treatment, flown to San Francisco to open for
Primus at the Fillmore auditorium.
Early in 2006, the IUMA website disappeared from the Internet. The site had already been closed to new submissions since 2001, when EMusic downsized, eliminating most of the IUMA staff. Despite this setback, much of IUMA's core group continued to work on a "volunteer" basis, in the hopes that IUMA could be resurrected. IUMA was then purchased by Vitaminic, an Italian music company.
In late May 2012,
Jason Scott Sadofsky (founder of
Textfiles.com) announced that much of IUMA's collection has been reposted via the
Internet Archive. John Gilmore, co-founder of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...
(EFF), managed to retrieve the surviving files before its shutdown.
Notes
{{reflist
External links
Contents of the IUMA sitemirrored at
archive.orgIUMA web sitearchived at archive.org
Blog post on the resurrection of IUMAInterview with Jon Luini on the life and death of IUMA
American music websites