Breakfast Blend: IUMA

Screenshot 2014-12-15 08.34.07I came across this article about the Internet Underground Music Archive this morning. IUMA started in 1993, was a website that allowed bands to post their songs and make pages for themselves. Started when the Web had tens of thousands of users, it persisted until 2006. The article tells how some music loving engineers got their, where Napster and mySpace and Soundcloud eventually landed, years earlier.

One problem, when they started, was that the file for one song could be the size of a user’s hard drive!

One of the stories in the piece is that of a band called the Himalayans, the band that Adam Duritz was in before Counting Crows, and the band that wrote and recorded the original version of Round Here, which was posted on the IUMA website long before it became a hit. The Himalayans’ version sounds a lot more like U2, I’d say.

Much of the IUMA trove can now be found at archive.com.

For instance, Inspector Ganja:

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