TheInternet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was an organization that provided a venue forunsigned artists to share their music and communicate with theiraudience. 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.[1] IUMA was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.[2]
IUMA originally existed asFTP andGopher sites, before theWorld Wide Web was widely used. On March 9, 1994CNN featured IUMA in their "Showbiz News" segment.[3] In June 1999, IUMA was purchased byEMusic, and moved operations fromSanta Cruz toRedwood City, home of the EMusic offices.IUMA provided artists who registered with a freeURL andweb page. The artists could present their music over theInternet instream,download, andinternet 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 wereWAV,AIFF andMP2.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.[4]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 forPrimus at the Fillmore auditorium.
IUMA was subsequently purchased in 2002 by Vitaminic, an Italian music company.[5]
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.[6] 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 (founder ofTextfiles.com) announced that much of IUMA's collection has been reposted via theInternet Archive. John Gilmore, co-founder of theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), managed to retrieve the surviving files before its shutdown.[7]
...27-year-old Jon Luini, who co-founded the hip Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) in 1993Alt URL