IUMA Is Back!

The Internet Underground Music Archive is back! The IUMA was probably the first hosting source for free, licensed music downloads. It went live in 1993, predating MP3.com and even came before the MP3 format and most of the web itself. The site closed shop in 2006 taking hundreds of thousands of songs offline with it. Many of those songs are now returning to the web, thanks to hosting on the ever amazing Internet Archive.

A brief history of the IUMA can be found at GigaOM. There is a good article about the IUMA at ASCII by Jason Scott.

Here is a classic! A piece from CNN's "Showbiz News" on IUMA in March 1994. It is so old, CNN actually explains what the Internet is!