The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was an organization that provided a venue for

unsigned artist An unsigned artist, unsigned band or independent artist is a musician or musical group not under a contract with a record label. The terms are used in the music industry as a marketing technique. Bands that release their own material on self-pub ...

s 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 online 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 The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

in 1993. IUMA originally existed as

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

and

Gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...

sites, before the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

was widely used. On March 9, 1994

CNN Cable News Network (CNN) is a multinational news organization operating, most notably, a website and a TV channel headquartered in Atlanta. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable ne ...

featured IUMA in their "Showbiz News" segment. In June 1999, IUMA was purchased by

EMusic eMusic is an Online music store, online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. In exchange for a monthly subscription eMusic users can download a fixed number of MP3 tracks per month. eMusic was established in 1998, is headquart ...

, and moved operations from Santa Cruz to

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in the Bay Area of Northern California, approximately south of San Francisco and northwest of San Jose. The city's population was 84,292 according to the 2020 census. The Port of Redwo ...

, home of the EMusic offices. IUMA provided artists who registered with a free

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

and

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

. The artists could present their music over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

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 strea ...

download In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar systems. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote ...

, and

internet radio Internet radio, also known as online radio, web radio, net radio, streaming radio, e-radio and IP radio, is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet. Broadcasting on the Internet is usually referred to as webcasting since it is not ...

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 Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

AIFF AIFF may refer to: * Audio Interchange File Format * All India Football Federation, the national governing body of Association football in India Film festivals * Addis International Film Festival, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia * Alexandria Internation ...

and

MP2 MP2 or MP-2 may refer to: Aviation * The second terminal of Marseille Provence Airport * Chyetverikov ARK-3 flying-boat Firearms * German Army designation for the Uzi * MP-2 machine pistol Science * MP 2, an abbreviation for a zone during t ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

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. IUMA was subsequently purchased in 2002 by Vitaminic, an Italian music company. 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. In late May 2012,

Jason Scott Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970) is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, Sketch The Cow, The Slipped Disk, and textfiles. ...

(founder of Textfiles.com) announced that much of IUMA's collection has been reposted via the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

. John Gilmore, co-founder of the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

(EFF), managed to retrieve the surviving files before its shutdown.

Notes

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External links

Contents of the IUMA site
mirrored at

archive.org The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applic ...

IUMA web site
archived at archive.org
Interview with Jon Luini on the life and death of IUMA
Defunct companies based in California Internet properties established in 1993 Internet properties disestablished in 2006 1993 establishments in California 2006 disestablishments in California 1999 mergers and acquisitions 2002 mergers and acquisitions American music websites Defunct American websites Redwood City, California Santa Cruz County, California