Wouldn't it be great to have access to 25,000 bands and artists and over 680,000 tracks that were pieces of history that tell the story of the "underground" ?
Back in 1992 three students from the University of California at Santa Cruz started the very first online music site that would serve as an archive for unsigned musicians and bands. The concept was simple and so began the internet music revolution. The site was named the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) and allowed bands to upload files and send them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail.
The site was puchased by a bunch of NFI's (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nfi) during the dotcom boom and sadly due to the clueless nature of the new owners died a sad death in 2006 when it was seemingly lost forever.....
Enter stage right , John Gilmore one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who managed to take a copy of the IUMA site before it slid away. Enter stage left, Internet archivist Jason Scott who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, and was able to resurrect IUMA based on Gilmore’s tape archives. Scott says of the resurrection, " you are in for a treat and a hell of a lot of modern musical history just got saved.”
The latest version of IUMA does not contain everything that has ever appeared on IUMA, however there is still a tonne of music, 243 days worth to be exact. Scott says the current version of IUMA should be “considered 1.0” and will to make sure the original data is “stored safely away so the next set of folks can try better techniques to get it back.” You can find the resurrected Internet Undergorund Music Archive here:http://archive.org/search.php?query=internet%20underground%20music%20archive
