Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music

Preface:

Enter the Foxhole

EVERYONE WHO WAS ALIVE during the George W. Bush nightmare knows the picture. If you were young and wired, up too late, fretting over your Top Eight, on the verge of discovering your new favorite band, and practicing the duckface you’d make in your next several thousand selfies, it’s burned into your memory like a CD-R.

There he is, Tom Anderson, sporting a white undershirt and a five o’clock shadow, his head tilted a few degrees toward the camera. His grin is as wide as the whiteboard hovering behind him like a scribble-filled thought bubble, and he’s smiling with his eyes in a way that conveys authentic excitement. He’s absolutely thrilled you’ve logged on to his site, and he’s so happy to be your friend. Until the last millennial shuffles off this mortal coil, this image will linger in the collective unconscious like a hypersaturated, hyperlinked Proustian reverie.

No one who worked with Anderson seems to have a bad word to say about him. He was a bit of a hustler, maybe, but ultimately a benign one. He loved music with all of his being, the true love that only a teenager can feel but some lucky adults can still tap into. He wanted to share that love above all, and so he maneuvered his way into cocreating the best website music fans of all stripes and sounds would ever know.

MySpace did not start the social media age, but it unquestionably brought social media to the masses. There was a time when you could reasonably argue this was a good thing. But if social media has taught us anything, it’s that people fuck up all the damn time. Every day, every minute. It’s what we do, and we’re damn good at it.

Sometimes it’s a small faux pas, and sometimes the fuckup changes the world, dashing dreams and ruining lives in the process. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve done in the moment, and you won’t realize your mistake until much later, if ever. But sometimes the universe lets you know quite clearly that you have fucked up. And if you’re Tom Anderson, the universe’s message takes the form of your best friend throwing a DVD at your head, wiping that signature grin off your face. It’s hard to miss a message like that.

Anderson had a work ethic beyond his years—he was always the last to leave the office—and an irrepressible boyish spirit. A true believer in music’s promise to bring people together, he wanted to connect the entire world through rabid fandom, hot jams, hotter babes, and a cool website with previously unimaginable bells and whistles. He just wanted us all to have a good time, together. But while he wanted to interlink the world, he didn’t always pay the necessary attention to it. He didn’t really know much about what Rupert Murdoch’s whole deal was when his company News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million in July 2005. All that adult stuff fell to Chris DeWolfe, Anderson’s partner and MySpace’s cofounder.

Like any former punk, Anderson was worried about The Man, but Murdoch assured him and DeWolfe that they could do what they wanted with the site; he’d just handle the business end. DeWolfe had lived through the dot-com bust of early 2000 that brought down once-hyped websites like Pets.com, and he knew their parent company Intermix Media needed money to keep up the skyrocketing growth they’d experienced in the past two years, lest they crash and burn like Friendster. Anderson wasn’t the type of cool guy who balked when his beloved indie act signed to a major. His favorite band in the world was Weezer, for goodness sakes. So what’s the worst that could happen? And why was Bích Ngọc Cao mad enough to throw a DVD at Anderson’s head?

Bích Ngọc Cao was a superwired, very online music fan in the ’90s, well before terms like streaming, MP3, or blog had entered the public consciousness. She first joined MySpace in late 2003, well before you, I, or anyone we knew did. Some things impressed her, some things didn’t, but the main thing that stayed with her about Anderson’s MySpace page was that under favorites, he had listed alternative rock one-hit wonder Superdrag. ¹

There’s an authenticity that comes with owning up to unfashionable tastes, and Cao remembers thinking Oh, he can’t be too bad, she says. It’s not the kind of band that you would brag about liking, because they weren’t cool.

She friended him and they chatted and started hitting the nightclubs together, scoping out fresh talent to feature on MySpace. Her plan for the summer of 2004 was to travel on the Lollapalooza tour as a volunteer for the political action committee MoveOn, helping to register voters for that fall’s election. Those plans fell through after the show was canceled due to poor ticket sales. ²

Instead she joined MySpace as the music editor, but you may as well have called her the Head Fan in Charge. She helped develop features that made the site a daily—or hourly—visit, which included a music player, a chart of the most popular unsigned artists that day, and an editorial page that highlighted both established and completely unknown artists, in the process creating careers and bestowing dreams.

The hours were long. The nights were late. The joy of knowing you’d helped someone find their favorite new artist or their new number-one fan was reward enough. She was aware that Intermix was being courted heavily by Viacom, owner of MTV, which Anderson had termed a dinosaur he was out to destroy. But while Cao had DeWolfe’s ear and trust, there are so many cool bands to discover and only so many hours in a day.

We were always talking about deals and things that might be rumbling through: the Facebooks and the Friendsters. I knew about a possible deal with Viacom. I didn’t know about the deal with Fox. As the company grew, I became less connected to that aspect, all of the biz, she says. I just didn’t have the space and time to be part of it. So I really didn’t know that that was happening. And so when the deal came down, I was really upset and sometimes really rude.

The idea that Fox News was a mendacious and unapologetic mouthpiece for reactionary right-wing talking points and was having a corrosive impact on the body politic was in the cultural air by 2005, but if you weren’t mainlining The Daily Show, you might not have picked up on it. (A few years later, it would be much harder to avoid this truth, unless you really loved how sand felt against your face.)

By 2005, the reelection of George W. Bush still stung. Despite both of his wars increasingly turning into debacles, he won a decisive victory, partly due to a sickening anti–gay marriage stance and partly due to the relentless cheerleading of Fox News drowning out any criticism of his failed record. And now, the CEO of the Fox News Evil Empire was going to have his hands on Cao’s baby. When they sold MySpace, I lost my mind, because I am a flaming liberal, she says. "I took a DVD of a film called Outfoxed about Fox News and I threw it at Tom’s head the day they sold the company. He ducked."

He went home and watched it, she says. Directed by Robert Greenwald, the 2004 film lays out how the news company that touted itself as fair and balanced was anything but, exposing how it relentlessly pushed conservative talking points and helped cheerlead Bush’s disastrous wars, all while spreading falsehoods and dog-whistling racism. On top of all that, the film also made it very clear that Fox’s whole thing was angry grandpa fare and not something a cool, cutting-edge youth culture product would ever want to be associated with.

He came back and he told me, ‘I didn’t know any of this stuff,’ she says. Tom was obsessed with what he was obsessed with, so he wasn’t necessarily connected to what was happening on a day-to-day basis in politics. I think he’s a liberal person. But it just wasn’t his thing.

As for DeWolfe, Cao says, I don’t necessarily know that he is super political as well, although he is a smart and connected person. I don’t know that either of them could have stopped the sale. They didn’t own the company.

Maybe if Anderson had been more aware of what News Corp was, he could have spoken out and prevented the acquisition, or urged Intermix to pursue a better counteroffer from Viacom. Perhaps Anderson would still be at MySpace and would still be our number-one friend.

Or maybe nothing could have been done. Perhaps Facebook would have won out anyway. But it certainly wasn’t predestined that Facebook’s clean-cut professionalism would beat the anarchic fun of MySpace; a lot of shortsighted decisions made it that way. Adults may have preferred the former, but the youth always favor the latter, and there’s never been a scenario in cultural history where the kids didn’t set the agenda. But the feeling that the adults in the room have let you down again is the eternal burden of being young.

Shortly after the acquisition, DeWolfe called an all-hands together to try to announce the deal in a positive way and told all of the employees that we would now be getting free lunch at work, she remembers. "I was a very defiant young person. There’s still a lot of that in me, but it was a lot more freewheeling back then. I’m a lot more calculating in how I behave these days.

I told everyone that we would now all be expected to work an extra hour every day because we wouldn’t be leaving for lunch.

A year later, MySpace would be the biggest website the Internet had ever seen. Four years later, neither DeWolfe nor Anderson would work at MySpace. Ten years later, MySpace in any meaningful sense would be long gone, as would the era it embodied in all its messy glory.

Introduction:

Why We Miss MySpace

FRANK IERO DOESN’T EVEN LIKE SOCIAL MEDIA all that much. But without it, he might not be a rock star.

At the start of the 2000s, one of his bands played a party for Makeoutclub, a dating website and early social media precursor. This was his introduction to the future of music, dating, society, and everything else, a preview of how we were all about to get super-connected. He wasn’t sold. Really, the whole thing just skeeved him out.

Oh, this whole thing is just for people who want to fuck each other, he remembers thinking. Plus, he admits, I’ve always been kind of an idiot when it comes to computers or anything of that nature.

Then MySpace arrived. After launching in the summer of 2003, it slowly gained users as people began to figure out what exactly it was. It took some time to catch on, as things went viral much more slowly back then, though that would very soon change.

Social media was a new concept at the time. Friendster, generally considered the first true social media site, was barely a year old, and Facebook was a year away from launching. While more and more households and college campuses were beginning to adopt high-speed Internet, most people didn’t live online the way we do now.

MySpace differed from Friendster in several ways, including a sharper design and the ability to curate the top eight people you wanted to present as your favorite bands and your closest besties, and for many people, the selection process was a source of great anxiety. (Whether those friendships were real or aspirational was immaterial.)

Beyond your profile, you had an entire customizable page to yourself, which you could trick out to your heart’s content. These pages included places for status updates, an About Me section and, as copied from Friendster, a digital wall where people could leave complaints that you hadn’t messaged them back yet.

But the crucial difference between MySpace and Friendster—and all other inferior social media platforms—was that MySpace let you embed songs onto your page, which allowed users to force new discoveries onto their friends, flaunt their cutting-edge taste, and document their shifting adolescent moods. Sometimes a small difference is all it takes to spark a paradigm shift, and the addition of a music player elevated MySpace from a fun digital distraction between classes to a gathering place for a community of music fans that never felt more alive than when they got to share their favorites.

It didn’t take long for fledgling garage bands, hungry rappers, and aspiring pop stars to appreciate the possibilities at play here. It had been accepted since the late ’90s that all musicians were required to have a website, even if almost no one had truly broken through to the larger world simply because they had a great web presence and a dedicated online fanbase going wild for them in the message boards. You still usually needed MTV and radio support for that. Some critical support and a grassroots fanbase were always nice, but never strictly required.

But MySpace was something different, something much easier to use, and easier to stumble upon. By allowing anyone to be a cool hunter just by futzing around online, MySpace fully changed the game, finally making the Internet the place where artists would be broken.

The good thing about MySpace is it was a super user-friendly, point-and-click sort of thing, Iero says. It seemed foolproof, and I was definitely a fool when it came to that kind of stuff. Before long, Iero remembers, all of his friends began flocking to the site and uploading their songs. That was the thing, he remembers, every time you start a new band, immediately, the first thing you do is you decide on a name, and the second thing you do is you start a MySpace page for it.

He never started a page just for himself. He never felt the need. But he had one for each of the bands he was in at the time. And he was in or had been in so many bands around that time that he can’t remember them all. He grew up in Belleville, New Jersey, and like any Jersey punk with a tolerant parent, his basement served as a petri dish for all kinds of loud-fast-rules groups, from Pencey Prep to I Am a Graveyard to American Nightmare. But there was one group he was in that was getting a bit more attention than all the rest.

Iero had recently dropped out of Rutgers University to join My Chemical Romance. Their front man Gerard Way was a big thinker, a scholar of rock music, comic books, and juvenilia detritus in all its glory. He had ambitious plans for the band, including a concept for what eventually became their debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. That album was released on the tiny New York label Eyeball Records in 2002, but Way was just getting started. A year after the album was released, the band still didn’t have much in the way of resources or national attention, but at least they now had MySpace.

We recorded one song because that’s all we had the money for at that point. So we put it up on MySpace immediately and were like, ‘Hey listen, we’re gonna do a record soon, once we get the money, but this is a sneak preview kind of thing,’ he says. And once we put that up, there were literally major label A&Rs calling the practice studio. How they got the number for the practice studio, I have no idea. And that’s when we were all like, ‘what’s happening?’ There’s something way bigger than we could’ve imagined. Is it someone’s job to troll MySpace and listen for new bands?

Before long, record label representatives for all the big companies were showing up to My Chemical Romance’s cramped basement shows. Eventually, they would later sign to the major label Reprise for their 2004 breakthrough Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, which would eventually go on to sell three million albums and turn them into one of the most beloved bands of the decade. But before radio and MTV launched singles such as I’m Not Okay (I Promise) and Helena into the mainstream, MySpace was where My Chemical Romance’s fans found the band, turning them from unknowns to cultishly adored to genuine, no-shit rock stars.

My Chemical Romance were one of the biggest acts to emerge from MySpace, but these outsiders weren’t exactly lonely. The intellectually inclined Thursday and the boyish Taking Back Sunday, their friends in the New Jersey and Long Island emo-punk scene, were also around just before MySpace launched, but the fan communities fostered there gave them a career boost and would rocket younger emo groups such as compulsive oversharers Fall Out Boy, the fiery Paramore, and the theatrical Panic! at the Disco into arenas.

Angsty rock fans may have been among the first to flock to MySpace, as those sorts of fans had been trained since the days of punk and college radio to look anywhere but the mainstream for validation and community. But MySpace had room for everyone and every taste. Fans of stylish hip-hop, fizzy dance pop, strummy adult contempo bops, artsy indie rock, and everything else quickly got in on the search party, proving that underground types didn’t have a monopoly on wanting to find tomorrow’s icon today. Not to get too rose-colored glasses about it, but when MySpace was at its peak, everybody—or at least everybody of a certain inclination—was having fun. Or trying to, at least. MySpace helped high school students Colbie Caillat and Soulja Boy find fans across the world when they began dominating the site’s unsigned artist charts. Record deals and MTV hits soon followed, but their stardom had already been coronated by a new generation of fans before the old gatekeepers caught up.

As MySpace grew in popularity, the stranglehold that corporate radio and MTV had long held on listening habits began to erode, allowing a new generation of artists to seize the spotlight. Music websites such as Stereogum and Pitchfork began anointing new voices of a generation, and MP3-based blogs such as Fluxblog, Nah Right, and BrooklynVegan became daily reads for fans searching for the latest and freshest. But MySpace was the glue that kept it all together, the place where fans of all stripes could get together to share, to gush, and to vent.

Ultimately, MySpace was the name that came to epitomize the Wild West of the new music industry. MySpace was right at the center of everything that made the time so exciting. And the same forces that killed MySpace also killed that free-floating feeling that everything was finally possible. At least for a time.

MySpace pioneered much of what is commonplace about the Internet today. Tila Tequila was a social media influencer before that was even a term, using her MySpace page and a shameless hustle to build followings. Comedians posted jokes to their pages to find fans and to launch DIY tours that were closer in spirit to get-in-the-van punk tours than traditional comedy shows. Movie studios and television networks began using the site to promote their latest endeavors, and cast members of The Office regularly blogged on the site (sometimes in character, while sitting in the background of a scene).

MySpace was far from perfect. As with literally any place on the Internet, it was overflowing with trolls, scammers, and abusers looking for their next mark. The music genre most closely associated with MySpace was the anthemic emo and pop-punk scene, which was rife with misogyny and sexual harassment and was overly, and distressingly, dominated by and marketed toward young white men. And then there’s the Rupert Murdoch of it all.

To retrospectively romanticize the era would be to rewrite history. The same problems of greed, prejudice, and unthinking cruelty that have always been part of society were amplified by the new digital tools. But so were the eternal virtues of connection, curiosity, and community. Ultimately, MySpace was more than just a social media site. It embodied the feeling that the old rules were out, and the rule makers with them, and we now had the chance to make our own culture. It was an idea, a metaphor for the optimism of its time and a shorthand for the freedom the Internet once promised to a hungry generation and anyone else looking for more than just more of the same.

When MySpace was at its height, it felt like the hub of the Internet. Thanks to MySpace, desperately loving music online wasn’t just a niche, online nerd thing anymore, because for a while, everyone was an online music nerd.

As you’ve noticed, the Internet devolved into a rather more frustrating, monopolized place, and the old rules seem more firmly calcified than ever before. Online leviathans Facebook and Google eat up the majority of advertising revenue, starving most of the vibrant and esoteric websites that make the Internet worthwhile out of business. This great money suck devastated the once thriving music blog community and put a serious hurt on the resources of the mainstream publications that once signal boosted the underground. All the while, the steadfast refusal of Facebook and Twitter to ban rampant disinformation and hate speech has turned social media into a cesspool as toxic as it is wearying.

Since the decline of MySpace, music discovery has regressed to the top-down phenomenon, with major labels spending millions to make their artists appear like viral sensations while true outsiders find it harder than ever to sustain a lasting career. Streaming services supposedly encourage discovery, but this usually amounts to fans passively accepting what algorithms have decided they will tolerate well enough to not skip, all while paying artists so little that giving them a singular crumb per stream would be more nourishing.

But when MySpace was at its strongest, fans were empowered to actively seek out new favorites for themselves. As any writer of fiction will tell you, an active choice is always more meaningful and exciting than a passive one. And there’s no one who misses the old MySpace more than the bands that were there.

Everyone was centralized in this one social platform. The audience was there, and the bands were there, and you could just click through and find out about bands that you liked, Iero says. Now I just feel like there’s so much shit everywhere. There’s too many bands, there’s too many sites, there’s just too much. It’s hard to get through.

A few defiant, unique, independently minded artists still manage to break through every year. But increasingly, there’s only a few, as it’s harder than ever to capture enough people’s attention so that you can continue to make your art. The height of MySpace now feels several lifetimes away, and the idea that the right MP3 could change your life overnight now reads as a romantic idea too quaint to be true. But for a while, it was a regular occurrence.

The connection between artists and fans, and between fans and their fellow fans, is life-affirming. MySpace put that often messy connection right at the heart of its service, remaking countless lives in the process. This is how that connection was made, and lost, as told by the artists, journalists, bloggers, executives, insiders, and scene kids who were there.

1

Back in the Day

MYSPACE WASN’T THE FIRST SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE and wasn’t the last social networking site, but it was the best social networking site. Which is an easy title for it to win, because it was also the only good social networking site. But that’s hardly the point.

The reason MySpace is so fondly remembered, years after most people kicked their ex out of their Top Eight, is that the site still serves as a synecdoche for a feeling, a freedom, a time.

Before MySpace, being a voracious online music fan was a niche, nerdy activity. But MySpace changed all that. Because of MySpace, everyone spent the 2000s searching for their next favorite song. Or at least that’s the way it felt at the time.

MySpace was a genuine pop explosion, like the British Invasion of the late ’60s or hip-hop’s conquest of the suburbs in the ’80s. MySpace Nation exploded out of nowhere, and suddenly, obscure bands with no fans at all were stunned to find themselves with huge international followings of kids. Emo was the official sound of MySpace, but everything was blowing up on the site all the time. That’s what made it great, bewildering, and aggravating.

MySpace created an entirely new way to be a lonely, confused teenager, and music was the site’s beating heart. If you were a weird kid (and most kids, correctly, think they are weird, because being human is just a weird endeavor) with no friends, suddenly there was this thing called a social network that would help you find your people. So no one else at your school likes emo, indie rock, goth, hip-hop, punk, or whatever subculture you’re obsessed with? So you don’t feel like you fit in anywhere? So you’re certain that everyone is off somewhere else having fun out there without you?

That’s no longer a problem. With MySpace, you could finally find your people, your scene, and your home. You could also find your new favorite band. And if you were lucky enough and dedicated enough, you could even find a coveted spot in your new favorite band’s Top Eight.

When MySpace launched on August 1, 2003, it changed the world overnight. But from the ’80s underground bands that set the table for Nirvana to the Bronx DJs whose block parties would one day lead to hip-hop becoming the soundtrack of America, every earthshaking cultural explosion has a number of forerunners that never quite get the credit they deserve. MySpace was the moment that music fandom fully moved online, but several antecedents paved the road to the Top Eight.

Internet forums have existed since the 1970s, back when the Internet was mostly a tool for the military and academia. In the ’80s and ’90s, a relatively small group of early adopters, many of them from The WELL, an early virtual community that started in 1985, figured out what e-mail lists and Usenet bulletin boards were well before most of the general populace had even heard the term dial-up. Message boards and the very idea of the Internet became a lot more popular in the mid-’90s as Internet usage became more mainstream and American Online (AOL) mailed every household a CD-ROM to coax them to log on. But half the time, you needed to know someone or get lucky to discover a worthwhile forum, and not everyone is lucky enough to have a cool friend. But some people do.

Courtney Holt is a music industry veteran who built his career by noticing opportunities others let pass them by. While he was working at Interscope, he was one of the few people at a major label willing to meet with the creators of Napster to figure out how labels could get ahead of file sharing. When he joined MySpace as the president of the offshoot MySpace Music and later became the president of the company, he tried to save the flailing site by converting it to a music streaming subscription model, just before Spotify came in and made that idea workable (for some). But before any of that, he was an ’80s New York punk kid who stumbled onto the earliest bulletin board systems.

I was pretty lucky that I went to a high school in New York that had a computer lab. My friends and I would operate bulletin boards. We would hack into the phone system and get thirty people on a call together and then prank call people, he says. There was Crazy Eddie, which was an electronics store that would match any advertised price. So we would get Atari 2600 cartridges for half off by creating these ads that looked real. Back then no one cared. I would say most of my interest was around general fuckery.

He continued to be a message board dweller as he grew out of his punk youth. Even in the early days of the Internet, free music was there for the downloading once the MP3 was created in the mid-’90s, but it was often too arduous a process to appeal to anyone but the diehards. It just took a little bit more work because you had to look into it as opposed to it being a database that’s searchable. There were communities that you had to go and basically search through what was effectively code. So it’s really fucking hard, but it was still free music, he says. But the digital listening experience was terrible, because you’re limited to MP3 software like Winamp on a computer, which was still not a great way to organize music. And it wasn’t portable. So a CD or a cassette was still a better listening experience.

MySpace harnessed and supercharged online music fandom, but it didn’t create it. The popularity of message boards continued to grow throughout the ’90s, and it offered something for every type of music fan.

By the end of the decade, small but thriving communities looking for something different were attracting enthusiastic and plugged-in denizens like Scott Heisel. Before he would become a music journalist for Alternative Press, a publication that found its final form as a MySpace-scene bible, he just wanted to talk about emo with someone.

Before she would befriend MySpace’s founder and help guide the site’s coverage as the music editor, Bích Ngọc Cao was an early online denizen as well. She seems to have a lifelong knack for being at the right place at the right time, as she was an early fan of the soft rock group Fisher, the first band to break online, and was active on the message board for the alternative rock singer Poe, ¹ whose fans organized when they discovered rock radio wasn’t playing her latest single, as female artists were rapidly disappearing from rock radio by 2000.

But the spread of the Internet was uneven and often quite regional in the late ’90s, and it wasn’t until MySpace hit that everyone more or less started getting online. Alain Macklovitch, aka A-Trak, was a Montreal-born DJ who began winning turntablist ² competitions as a high schooler. In the late ’90s, he didn’t spend much time on the Internet, aside from the occasional scratch tournament forum, though that would eventually change. He later became an active blogger, cofounded the influential label and record store Fool’s Gold, and served as an unofficial big brother to the ’00s wave of alternative rappers.

A-Trak was one of the digital foot-draggers that didn’t get themselves fully online until the MySpace Era arrived. But once it did, they got on board. We all did.

(All quotes have been edited for clarity and length.)

BÍCH NGỌC CAO (MYSPACE MUSIC EDITOR): Poe was the first person I ever heard sing a song where she mentioned a modem. I went online and I found a fan site by a guy named Jared, who’s still my friend. We found a bunch of fans who joined an e-mail list in which we wrote to each other every day about the things that we liked about her music and sharing other music. These are all tools that we built for each other.

COURTNEY HOLT (MYSPACE MUSIC PRESIDENT): I was at A&M Records when the first MP3 player came out. I ended up purchasing one. I was working in digital, whatever they called it, new media, and I worked for a gentleman named Milt Olin, and I said, Hey, give me five songs in order. Any five songs off the top of your head. It was a Byrds song, a Dictators song, a Soundgarden song, some other stuff, and a Bob Dylan song. Twenty minutes later, I walked back with the MP3 player filled with those songs in order, which I’d stolen off the Internet in a pre-Napster era on Usenet. And that was the wake-up call.

A-TRAK: In my scratch years, around ’96, ’97, ’98 or so, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz had a message board. Sometimes I would go to other cities for shows and meet other scratch DJs who would bring up all types of inside jokes and things from that board.

CAO: The beauty of the early music Internet is that all of the fans banded together and became friends and made tools that kids today really take for granted. I’ve been trying to tell my boyfriend’s kids about what the Internet was like back when we were young because they have everything just handed to them from corporations and they have no idea what it’s like to build a listserv and figure out how to do a tape trade with a bunch of random people that you met and you have no idea what they look like, and yet they’re your friends.

SCOTT HEISEL (ALTERNATIVE PRESS EDITOR): I was a huge Internet kid from the beginning. I had websites in the ’90s, my brother ran a BBS [bulletin board system]. In terms of discovering music, I read Collective -Zine.co.uk a lot—they were a big emo and indie website for reviews.

A-TRAK: There were two or three online record stores that I remember going to regularly to order vinyl, basically—HipHopSite.com and Sandbox Automatic. I remember going to those and they would have a little RealPlayer snippet of a song and then you could buy records, vinyl, on mail order.

CAO: Poe’s first album came out and had an alternative rock hit with Angry Johnny. And then the second album came out, and by that time, radio was playing people like No Doubt, and radio program managers literally told her team, We’re already playing a woman. We don’t need another one. And then there was a song called Hey Pretty, and then she released it to a radio station in Portland, and we blew up their phone lines. We organized and we went nuts. They have no idea that we are calling from all over the world, and we created a rock hit. We’re teenagers, for the most part.

While the polarities would one day drastically reverse, in the ’90s, music was still mainly covered in print magazines, which either didn’t even bother with a website, or had one that was neglected and run by junior staff members and interns, with maybe the occasional news update.

The idea of online music journalism was in its infancy back then, with the one major exception being the website Addicted to Noise. Started by former Rolling Stone journalist Michael Goldberg, it was the first online magazine and even featured the then-novel inclusion of audio snippets in its reviews. It later merged with a company called SonicNet.

I actually used to work for SonicNet. And I guess this was ’95, I wanna say. I gotta be frank with you, nobody really knew what to do with it, including the people who worked for it, remembers Norman Brannon, a writer, publicist, educator, and former guitarist for influential emo forebearers Texas Is the Reason. It was very, very early music Internet. Viacom eventually bought SonicNet, and then they folded it.

But while the first major online music publication was the victim of corporate negligence, another one would have a more lasting impact. Pitchfork Media was founded in 1996 by Ryan Schreiber, a young Minneapolis high school graduate and record store clerk who would quickly move to Chicago. Influenced by college radio and ’90s zine culture, he fostered a website for people who felt that the alternative music pushed by MTV and commercial radio wasn’t alternative enough and who instead wanted something smarter and edgier and not diluted for mainstream consumption.

But in the ’90s, few people noticed it, aside from Mark Richardson, who would eventually become the site’s managing editor, editor in chief, and executive editor and is credited with helping to elevate the site’s coverage into something less snarky and more thoughtful.

Definitely my introduction to online music as a thing was really when I found Pitchfork, which was 1997. And then I started writing for it in 1998. I definitely read Addicted to Noise, he remembers. I lived in San Francisco. I worked at this very large law office. I could waste time at work looking at the web. It was covering things I was familiar with, but also introducing me to stuff. So I became a daily reader, pretty regularly, then shortly after that, I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a call for writers.’

Eventually, Pitchfork would become the dominant music publication of the ’00s, often cherry-picking MySpace’s artist profiles for fresh finds. But right alongside MySpace and Pitchfork was the explosion of music blogs. Often called MP3 blogs, they were ubiquitous at the time, offering downloads of brand-new and unheard-of artists; the best blogs had writing as fresh as the sounds. If message boards weren’t your thing, here was something a bit more accessible. Soon, the blogs, Pitchfork, and the fans would work in synergy with MySpace to establish how music felt in the ’00s.

MARK RICHARDSON (FORMER PITCHFORK EDITOR IN CHIEF): It’s really hard to even describe what the Internet was like before Google, because there was no clear way to find anything that you were looking for. The existing search engines were very poor. I did discover Pitchfork before Google. ³ I remember that the first thing I read on it was an interview with Dean Wareham about Luna. ⁴

HOLT: You really had to know where to look, and you had to be really deliberate about what you were looking for. Most of what you could find were things that weren’t effectively mainstream but were in demand. I could find Bowie, Springsteen, and Dylan bootlegs and a bunch of the stuff that ended up becoming reissues. In the ’80s and ’90s there was always the bootleg section of the independent record store, and that stuff migrated to the Internet really quickly.

NORMAN BRANNON (TEXAS IS THE REASON): So after SonicNet, that’s when the bulletin board systems started taking hold, and it was very sort of a decentralized platform. It was just a lot of kids talking shit, as the Internet is wont to do. And so very early on, everybody knew that that’s what the Internet was going to be. I remember at the end of Texas Is the Reason, there was specifically, alt.music.hardcore was the place where everybody went to talk shit, and already, we were getting drawn into drama.

CAO: I had a really weird existence as a child where my parents were very strict. But they didn’t understand what I was doing because they were immigrants, so I got away with doing things that I think a lot of kids would not have. I basically spent my childhood in Almost Famous. I was on tour with bands. The only thing I wasn’t doing was, I wasn’t sleeping with them. I really wasn’t writing about them.

BRANNON: We were in an analog world for the majority of our existence. It was a big deal when we were in CMJ or Alternative Press or Spin. I didn’t think of Internet press as real press. Which is funny if you think about it now.

RICHARDSON: The consensus is the years of rapid growth are between 2000 and 2003. And that’s when file sharing was also at a peak. I guess Napster stopped in there, but file sharing was still going on. So I always thought the early rise of Pitchfork is very connected with the early days of file sharing, in that it was an obsessive music magazine that covered a lot of albums and published a lot of content. You could tell that it was getting bigger and it was more of a thing.

One of the main reasons that online music journalism struggled for a foothold in the ’90s was because it was still difficult to find music online unless you knew what you were doing.

While MySpace was the first website where you could stream music that the general populace noted, it had an important precursor in MP3.com, a website launched in 1997 and run by Michael Robertson that let independent musicians sell their song files.

The main success story of MP3.com and the pre-Napster music web was Fisher, a soft-rock duo composed of vocalist Kathy Fisher and Ron Wasserman, a former heavy metal musician who later wrote theme songs for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and music for the ’90s X-Men cartoon. They had a song on the Great Expectations soundtrack in 1998, and Atlantic Records had an option on the band but wouldn’t actually sign them. What you hear about every band always going through, where you’re under contract, he says, but they won’t do a damn thing.

They began printing their own CDs and uploading their songs. On the strength of the lovely coffee shop jam I Will Love You, they became the first group to jump from the web to the Billboard charts, with the song hitting number thirty-six on the Adult Top 40 countdown in 2000.

Fisher earned a short-lived deal with Interscope’s subsidiary label Farmclub.com (also the name of a Interscope Records–produced show that aired on the USA Network in the late ’90s, featuring performances from bands found on MP3.com and other online music industry feeders, an interesting but too-early attempt to find talent from the Internet). Fisher would later split with Interscope over business disputes, and no one else would quite follow Wasserman in breaking big off MP3.com, though not for a lack of trying.

No one tried harder to make the brave new world work for them than California’s Sherwood. Led by the extremely determined Nate Henry, they were a pop-rock band with a Beach Boys–like wistfulness that pivoted, perhaps too hard, to a more straight-ahead pop-punk sound tailored with exacting precision for the Warped Tour crowd. But before Sherwood would sign with MySpace Records, they were a bunch of college students lurking on MP3.com and, later, PureVolume, a similar streaming website that became popular with the punk and emo scene upon its launch in 2003.

CAO: There’s a band called Fisher. They had always been told, "these songs