IUMA: Digital Music’s First Big Chance ⇥ medium.com

Caleb Garling:

In IUMA’s final days, computing celebrity John Gilmore furiously scraped the tracks — imploring others to do the same — and stowed them away. In 2012 he worked with Jason Scott of Archive.org to put the “wreckage” of IUMA, as Scott calls it — 45,000 bands and over 680,000 tracks — back on the web, where it remains today, free for anyone to access.

“It’s what it was always meant to be: a big pile of music that people enjoy listening to,” Scott says. (Though about 100 artists have asked Scott to remove their music, many having shed punk guitar riffs for collared shirts.)

Casual browsing turns up all kinds of hidden gems. Adam Duritz was the lead singer of The Himalayans and would eventually bring the band’s song “Round Here” to the Counting Crows and the top of Billboard charts. Duritz ensured The Himalayans got songwriting credits for the iconic ’90s tune, and their version remains preserved on Archive.org.

Scott says listeners sometimes come across the IUMA music and review it, as if it were new, having no idea these tracks were first uploaded in the 1990s. “The music is timeless,” he says. “It just might be more angry at the first Bush than the second.”