While the conversation currently dominating all quarters of the music industry is the monetisation of streaming and how a consumer base that has come to expect free music will adapt to it, many, perhaps even those involved in the debate, are likely unaware of just where the conversation started.

It may surprise you, but the seemingly unsolvable issues of money in music, exposure for upcoming artists, and how indie outlets can survive in a world where every entertainment and copyright lawyer is on the majors’ bankroll, didn’t start with Napster.

In fact, these conversations were first sparked before the first line of code that would eventually become Napster had even been typed. In 1993, while most of us were still figuring out how to turn on a computer, the Internet Underground Music Archive was right in the thick of it.

Started by buddies Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson, and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was for the ’90s what SoundCloud is today. A repository where independent bands and artists could have their music heard by the world.

In fact, IUMA was so ahead of its time that on the page, it becomes hard to distinguish it from SoundCloud. Artists could curate their very own pages, upload songs as they please, and receive feedback from fans who were able to download the tracks or, eventually, listen to them on the site.

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Much to the creators’ surprise, soon after launching, comments started coming in from listeners in Wisconsin, Russia, and elsewhere. According to Patterson, who recently spoke to Medium, punk-ska giants Sublime used those comments to prove to MCA, their eventual label, that they had a following outside southern California.

And Sublime aren’t the only success story. One of the many bands to use IUMA in the mid-’90s was a Bay Area group called The Himalayans, whose frontman, Adam Duritz, would eventually take one of the tracks uploaded to IUMA, ‘Round Here’, and make it a hit with his next band, Counting Crows.

So why is SoundCloud, despite its own fiscal issues, a ubiquitous tour de force and IUMA is now destined to be one of the most popular pages on the Internet Archive? Well, for one thing, Lord, Patterson, and Luini made a tactical era in launching the site when users were still toiling with 56k modems.

Indeed, IUMA was so ahead of its time that broadband hadn’t even been invented when they started offering users a place to download free music. Naturally, this limited the site’s reach. Meanwhile, clashes over business strategy — Lord wanted to focus on music sales, while Patterson wanted to bank on ads — also caused friction.

Then, in 1999, the music world fractured. As Medium writes, “Napster showed the world — not just geeks — how easily one could pirate music. Copyrighted content spilled all over the Internet, and for a time it seemed like it would never be cleaned up. Consumers began to believe that music should be free.”

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IUMA was suddenly faced with its biggest ever problem: If music fans weren’t willing to pay for Metallica, what are the chances they would pay for a tiny band from Venice Beach or Five Points? After all, music was now merely data on a hard drive, and why pay for something that costs nothing to replicate?

While they were at the forefront of this rapidly mounting issue facing the music industry, IUMA was also toiling with the problem of artists “graduating” from IUMA. While conventional wisdom would dictate that as an artist grew, so does the platform, this didn’t prove true in the real world.

When artists graduate from “indie” to the bigtime, as Lorde, who released her first EP for free on SoundCloud, once did, they most often move on to bigger platforms and bigger management. Unfortunately for platforms like IUMA and SoundCloud, this is the point when consumers will pay for their music.

Speaking to Medium, Patterson now looks back on IUMA with nothing but joy and a mindfulness of the similar issues still plaguing music. “The part we didn’t solve was the discovery,” Patterson says of IUMA. “Great, now your music is out there — but how are people finding it? I still don’t think that’s been cracked.”

However, to many of us who were around to enjoy the wealth of great music available on IUMA, it not only stands as a nostalgic reminder of the first wave of the digital music revolution, but how the industry itself missed out on its chance to jump on the wave as it was forming and not simply scramble on as it broke.

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