archive fever, part 1798


(via Wired)

"The origins of the online music revolution are back, thanks to internet archivist extraordinaire Jason Scott. Scott, who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, has resurrected the Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA as the kids called it back in 1992, when they were uploading songs via Gopher....

"the IUMA’s goal was to create an online music archive for unsigned musicians and bands. The idea was simple: Bands uploaded files and sent them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail. ...

"The IUMA site eventually came to host thousands of bands and hundreds of thousands of songs, many in MP2 and other long-since-abandoned audio formats. Like so many other sites of that era, IUMA was eventually sold off during the dot-com boom years to a series of clueless owners who let the site die a slow death of neglect until it was shut down completely in 2006.... Fortunately John Gilmore — perhaps best known for helping to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation — had the foresight to grab a copy of the site....

"Now Scott has used Gilmore’s tape archives to resurrect the IUMA site.... ” The rescued archive doesn’t have everything that ever appeared on IUMA, but it does resurrect some 25,000 bands and artists and over 680,000 tracks of music. That’s 243 days worth of music for those of you more accustomed to iTunes than IUMA"

who on earth has the time to trawl through this tranche?

as with private press stuff, can't help thinking that anyone who couldn't get signed in the 90s, to one or other of the myriad small-scale, niche-market oriented labels in existence.... perhaps they were deservedly unknown... 

but i suppose it's Good that It Was All Documented, for the sake of future anthropologists / sociologists / historians of amateur music production...

intro to the reclamation project from that Jason Scott dude