Music Lovers Drool Over The Internet

Long before commercial interests were influent on the Internet, its users were using it to distribute and find information about their favorite music. With Usenet newsgroups, IRC channels, mailing lists and FTP sites, users would make available lyrics, guitar tablature, and bits of trivia about various different musical artists.

Now keep in mind, this was before the World Wide Web (Can you imagine that?) so, there was no way to lay out the information on a Web page. There was no Netscape Navigator with which to view images and movies with. Music enthusiasts would represent all their information in plain, straight ASCII text. For example, a standard method for representing guitar tablature in electronic mail was designed and is still in use today.

Newsgroups such as rec.music.misc were hot spots in the middle to late 1980s for people to talk about their favorite music. Of course, not everyone agreed with what everyone else had to say. For example, many rec.music.misc participants found out that people either absolutely love the music of the Canadian progressive rock band Rush... or hate it with a passion. Jimmy Lang, an avid Rush fan, decided to set up a mail reflector in November of 1989 so Rush fans could exchange information amongst themselves without worrying about being criticized for their taste in music by other Internet users.

"The National Midnight Star", as it was eventually named, is now the largest music mailing list on the Internet and could also be the oldest. Mail sent to this list is reflected back out to over 4000 Rush fans on the Internet. For information about this list, see http://syrinx.umd.edu/.

Today, there are hundreds of mailing lists devoted to the discussion of popular musical artists and music in general. If you're interested in finding out more about what music-related mailing lists are available, see http://server.berkeley.edu/~ayukawa/lomml.html.

In recent years, Usenet has expanded its heirarchy of music related newsgroups to accomodate the high demand for diverse music discussion areas. Where there used to be just rec.music.misc, there is now over 40 rec.music.* groups including rec.music.funky, rec.music.classical, and rec.music.industrial. In addition there are probably close to 100 alt.* newsgroups devoted to music-related topics.

Before the World Wide Web, FTP sites were used as archives of information. One very popular FTP site for many years was at cs.uwp.edu (now ftp.uwp.edu) which holds all types of information including lyrics to songs, guitar tablature, pictures, MIDI (electronic music) files, and mailing list archives. All this information was compiled and formatted by Internet users. As a result, some of the lyrics are best-guesses. But, no other archive exists like it. Point your Web browser at ftp://ftp.uwp.edu/pub/music.

You can only image what Internet music-lovers did when the World Wide Web came about. Take a look at Yahoo's index of music related WWW sites to see an example ( http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/ ).

As the Internet becomes more popular and commonplace, it has caught the eye of many major recording labels such as Warner Brothers and Sony. Today, you'll find Web sites by many music labels full of information about artists they manage. It's a great place to find out when your favorite band is playing in concern near you. For more information see http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Music/Labels/.

If you're a music lover (and even if you're not), the Internet is probably the best place to start if you're looking for information about your favorite band or performer. Give it a spin.