force and the adolescent aggression seemed inevitable.
The sleepy, beachside city of Santa Cruz, California, is known for several things: a good university with a reputation for intellectual adventure; a population of New-Agey free spirits; and a natural environment that seems to infuse a mellow hedonism in most of its inhabitants. While very typically Californian, the city feels like the polar opposite of Los Angeles: little crime, no frantic social climbing, and certainly not much in the way of an entertainment industry. In 1993, at least in as much as any event on the Web can be said to occur in one place, Santa Cruz became the birthplace of the online music phenomenon.
The wave of change that would see fans turning to the Internet for their tunes, and away from the distribution networks built by large entertainment corporations, began, as is so often the case, with a couple of bright collegiate misfits. Though they did very little research, not much coding, and developed no new ways to compress music, what they did was build a Web site that offered a new way for people to get music and for musicians to reach an audience.
The buzzing of Web activity gave the West Coast a portentous feeling that year. Nationally, the time was ripe for invention. While the Reagan era sometimes felt like a long backward glance, Bill Clinton and Al Gore had just begun an administration that at the very least embraced an optimistic, forward-looking vocabulary, spotlighting initiatives that pushed the new “information superhighway.” In the business world, offices that had never before even needed calculators were suddenly acquiring computers that sprawled over desktops to become the focus of a worker’s attention. News of the Internet was beginning to pique the interest of the public and the media. Wired magazine had launched its first issue, including an article about libraries replacing their books with digitized copies, an idea with obvious overlap in other media. The story wondered, “if someday in the future anybody can get an electronic copy of any book from a library free of charge, why should anyone ever set foot in a bookstore again?” The focus on print was predictable; text was much easier to send over low bandwidth, and the Net was built largely around words. Meanwhile, those with an interest in music were wondering what the Internet could do for them. About the same time Wired was launched, a pair of University of California Santa Cruz students hatched a plan to answer that question.
The pair doing the hatching were Jeff Patterson and Rob Lord, two friends who shared a love for music, as well as a distaste for the bland offerings of mainstream record labels. Patterson was a lanky, long-haired blond; Lord, olive-skinned and often seen wearing an amused, knowing smile. Before going away to school, Lord had been manager of a record store in his hometown of Valencia, California. Being the final link in the long chain of the music business was an experience that shaped his feeling towards the establishment. The narrow range of available product and the heavy-handed marketing of the industry put him off. His own preferences leaned towards college radio staples like the anguished cries of Joy Division or the lush and dreamy washes of sound made by Galaxy 500, as well as music from the burgeoning rave scene—distant cries from the mass-market records he usually sold.
“I was the stereotypical music store employee,” explained Lord, “saying things like ‘Barbra Streisand—you can’t listen to her, and you can’t kill her … Beep.’ Like any discerning music fan, you ended up selling all of this music that you wished people wouldn’t buy. I kept thinking to myself that if only there were a better way of getting better music distribution.”
Patterson was equally frustrated with the narrow range of musical choices readily available and was miffed by the few options open to musicians wanting to expose their works to a wider audience. He had firsthand experience in that regard and was hoping there might be a way for his band, The Ugly Mugs, to expose its music—songs with names like “Cold Turd on a Paper Plate”—to people who would appreciate it. Music like his wouldn’t be released by Warner or BMG, but would probably appeal to a larger audience than Santa Cruz slackers, if only the songs could get out there.
At school, Lord studied information theory and digital signal processing, fortuitously under the tutelage of David Huffman, whose Huffman encoding algorithm was popularly in use (it was, as it happened, a main component of the MP3 protocols). Lord also worked part-time as the computer consultant to the UC art department. His encounter with the newly developing Web was deeply affecting and he became gripped with a fervor to promulgate Web browsers to anyone within reach. Mosaic was the most popular browser available at the time. Freshly released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, it featured a graphic user interface that made using it easy. Lord diligently installed copies of Mosaic on all of the department’s computers. The idea of a universal interface to data, combined with new audio compression and player technologies he was learning about under Huffman, sparked an epiphany in Lord, and he and Patterson began to brainstorm ideas about how to combine the two. A decent student, Lord was nonetheless not thrilled with school; he claims he wasn’t having enough fun and was hoping to find something that might combine his two passions: music and technology. That something would materialize one day as Lord trolled the Internet, searching for interesting ways to compress sound files (compressing the data in a music file was necessary to send it manageably over the Internet). He discovered the Xing Player, a piece of software that played musical files compressed using the MP2 algorithm. A quick download and a listen was all it took to hook Lord, and his life took a quick, profound turn. He became a cheerleader, what could even be called an evangelist, for online music. His e-mail signature line read “Free or Shareware Music, Internet Distribution of Music Will Change All,” with a link pointing everyone towards the Xing Player. Friends and acquaintances followed his suggestion, and years before Napster hit, Lord became a key figure in a clique that seemed to instinctively understand the power that Internet distribution held for music.
With ambitions to bring together as much music-related content as he could get his hands on, Lord opened an account at the popular public server Sunsite, which let him store his Web site for anyone to download. From there, inspired by revolutionary dreams and technological fervor, Lord and Patterson took the leap to launch one of the Web’s first start-up companies. Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA, was set up in a small office above a Santa Cruz gay bar. The Web start-up pattern was in full effect from day one: Lord and Patterson slept under their desks, and paid the wages of the few acting school dropouts they’d managed to recruit as employees by picking up a weekly burrito tab.
At first, IUMA was really two sites in one, one on the Web, which required greater computing power than many had in that day, and one that used “File Transfer Protocol” or FTP. The sites gave bands a place to tell the world about themselves and also to offer music for download. Much of the music IUMA hosted was initially sent in on cassette tape, leaving the encoding to the staff, for which the company charged a small fee. Anyone could pay $240 a year and post one song and band photos and offer merchandise for sale. It was a learning experience for all involved. It gave Lord, among other things, a lesson in the power of PR. Following the other now-familiar Web start-up pattern, the media was quick to pick up on IUMA’s high-tech buzz, and the newly minted executive quickly learned to fan the fires of publicity with revolutionary rhetoric.
“This is going to kill the music industry,” Lord proclaimed to the San Jose Mercury News in 1993. From the pages of the Silicon Valley daily newspaper, it was a quick jump to CNN and then the cover of Billboard. The music industry had a new and boisterous, if somewhat ill-defined and as yet naive, foil. Like a clever youngster testing limits, Lord and IUMA helped point the Internet generation at a new target against which it could gauge its growing strength. The music industry was a dinosaur that didn’t understand the promise of the Net and had stifled its own creativity through the pursuit of corporate profits. This unsteady new establishment wanted to take over.
IUMA promised to be the place where less overtly commercial bands could create Web pages and reach more diverse audiences, despite the high-tech threshold for Internet use. In 1993, less than 3 percent of American classrooms were connected to the Net, compared to more than half in 2000. Even when traffic was minimal, music clips were being downloaded from as far away as Russia—an appealing prospect to bands unaccustomed to being heard outside their hometowns. Remember, at the time it was novel to make human contact of any kind using your computer; to have distant foreigners visit your