I'm writing something and want to make sure it's factually sound. My question:

In late 1999, how likely would it have been (if at all) that a local rock band would have had a website or some other presence on the Net (even if it was just a brief bio and some photos somewhere)?

Your help with this would be greatly appreciated!

I think so. I can't remember if MySpace was around then, though. If so, they'd almost surely have been on MySpace.

But a website? Maybe. If they had a computer guy in the band, then sure.

I'm thinking not as likely. That was about the time I was getting on line on a daily basis and I only recall major names having websites. Real shitty ones at that.

You might be more accurate to say that they had an advert in the local city magazine or had fliers on telephone poles.

Prince launched love4oneanother.com in 1997.

http://www.citypages.com/...other-com/

If the rockband had a geeky member or someone who was on AOL (member homepage kinda thing?) it's probably likely. It wouldn't have been a good means of promotion but those in the know might have seen it.

I remember in 2000 booking a couple of hostels in Europe by finding ads for them on the internet and that seemed so crazy. We did it without a travel agent. By email. WOW.

Hmm, I agree with Carrie...back then AOL was it. I was in high school in '99. The only thing I'd access the internet for was mainly for emails, chat rooms and instant messenger. This was before Blackplanet and MySpace, so if the local band had an AOL account or something like that, it could be possible but other than that, it wouldn't had been likely that they would have had their own website.

[Edited 9/14/12 10:16am]

I remember my dad buying a book in 1997 that purported to list every website in the world. And for a microsecond, it probably did!

missfee said:

Hmm, I agree with Carrie...back then AOL was it. I was in a junior in high school in '99. The only thing I'd access the internet for was mainly for emails, chat rooms and instant messenger. This was before Blackplanet and MySpace, so if the local band had an AOL account or something like that, it could be possible but other than that, it wouldn't had been likely that they would have had their own website.

Agree. I do remember websites from back then, especially arty sites and fun stuff made mostly by geeky folks (like Burt is Evil) but it was awfully limited.

Thanks, guys!

Ace said:

I'm writing something and want to make sure it's factually sound. My question:

In late 1999, how likely would it have been (if at all) that a local rock band would have had a website or some other presence on the Net (even if it was just a brief bio and some photos somewhere)?

Your help with this would be greatly appreciated!

Geocities!

paisleypark4 said:

Ace said:

I'm writing something and want to make sure it's factually sound. My question:

In late 1999, how likely would it have been (if at all) that a local rock band would have had a website or some other presence on the Net (even if it was just a brief bio and some photos somewhere)?

Your help with this would be greatly appreciated!

Geocities!

There's a blast from the past! Thanks, pp!

This might help you get a sense of the web in 99:

http://archive.org/web/web.php

type in the adddress for a website (like macys or amazon, or any site you think has been around 10 years).

The site will return versions of the site going back to 97 or so (look at the top of the screen for prior year versions). Gives you a great sense of how the web has changed, what sites were like back then, etc.

You can always go here:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what...et+in+1999

Thanks again, guys!

Ace said:

I'm writing something and want to make sure it's factually sound. My question:

In late 1999, how likely would it have been (if at all) that a local rock band would have had a website or some other presence on the Net (even if it was just a brief bio and some photos somewhere)?

Your help with this would be greatly appreciated!

it depends on the city really. in most places it wouldn't be likely. musicians would have been into the traditional flyering and posters and local newsletters/papers etc

in some cities like NYC and LA it would have perhaps been more likely. i remember a friend managed a band in 2000 and they wanted tips of getting big and i suggested a name change to www.rockband.com which was a new idea at the time. i should have copyrighted the idea as the game took that name

Shee-it. My band had a webpage in '99. It wasn't as big a deal as you might think. Back then you'd see a lot of crappy "Under Construction!" links, and Geocities garbage, but having your own website for whatever was quickly becoming a normal and expected thing.

AOL, Compuserve, free JUNO email accounts... those were the days. Fuck AOL, what a piece of shit business model that was.

paisleypark4 said:

Geocities!

YES! I forgot abut that, but I had a terrible Geocities web site

But the first real presence I had was on MP3.com, and I am pretty sure that was right around 1999.

This is somewhat off topic but i thought it was interesting.

Article taken from abcnews.go.com

How the first photo was posted on the Web 20 years ago

Three British singers with a Cern laboratory music group appear in the first picture posted to the World Wide Web (WWW) two decades ago, it has emerged.

Image 1 of 7

This image of the Les Horribles Cernettes was the first picture to be posted on the World Wide Web: From left: Angela Higney, Michele de Gennaro, Colette Marx-Neilsen, Lynn Veronneau. Photo: SILVANO DE GENNARO/CERN

By Andrew Hough

6:00AM BST 11 Jul 2012

The singers performed with the Les Horribles Cernettes (LHC), an all-female parody comedy group, based at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research centre, in Switzerland.

Colette Marx-Nielsen, Angela Higney, both originally from Glasgow and Michele de Gennaro, from Worcester, posed with Candian Lynn Veronneau for the extraordinary image, which became the first ever picture uploaded to the Web.

The remarkable picture was taken on July 18, 1992, by Silvano de Gennaro, an IT developer at Cern and was posted by his then colleague, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who created the World Wide Web.

Full article

http://abcnews.go.com/Tec...FOoKo2y-1s

Quite likely.

It was just that they were horribly designed and usually had ad banners (musicians that were just starting out weren't really willing to pay for hosting). The sites had all kinds of info no one really wanted to read, but it seemed to be hard for some bands to even update the dates for their upcoming gigs. There were also lots of subpages and links that took you away from your page (hell, my own page even had the redundant "links" page up to 2008). Oh yeah... and who can forget all the terrible photoshop / paintshop style effects applied on pretty much every image?

Usually there wasn't much video or audio either. Just highly compressed soundbytes or something like that.

Yahoo Excite Altavista WTF is Google?

Very, very , VEERRRRRRY likely.

Indie artists had already taken to the Internet by 96/97ish.

I remember yahooing "Alien Sex Fiend" which was well established at the time, but was still surprised how many sites were devoted to them.

But, artists had already taken to the Internet and establishing pages. Messageboard sites also were going crazy with unofficial fansites.

It was "Commerce" that had not yet caught on. Establishing ways to sell services and products was still so-so in 96. By 1999 I remember it being pretty good, but nothing like now.

An interesting thing to do is see the affect that PORN sites had on commerce in the Internet. Many of the technologies used by companies today were pianeered by pornsites.

In '99 a lot of artists had websites. I don't think they paid as close attention to them, but I do recall major artists with websites then.

imago said:

An interesting thing to do is see the affect that PORN sites had on commerce in the Internet. Many of the technologies used by companies today were pianeered by pornsites.

Yeah, I remember some pornsites that had accompanying music whenever you logged in, but I don't think they used pianos. It sounded more like synthesizers to me.

Visionnaire said:

imago said:

An interesting thing to do is see the affect that PORN sites had on commerce in the Internet. Many of the technologies used by companies today were pianeered by pornsites.

Yeah, I remember some pornsites that had accompanying music whenever you logged in, but I don't think they used pianos. It sounded more like synthesizers to me.

I wish I knew.

[Edited 9/15/12 8:48am]

Visionnaire said:

imago said:

Very, very , VEERRRRRRY likely.

Indie artists had already taken to the Internet by 96/97ish.

I remember yahooing "Alien Sex Fiend" which was well established at the time, but was still surprised how many sites were devoted to them.

But, artists had already taken to the Internet and establishing pages. Messageboard sites also were going crazy with unofficial fansites.

It was "Commerce" that had not yet caught on. Establishing ways to sell services and products was still so-so in 96. By 1999 I remember it being pretty good, but nothing like now.

An interesting thing to do is see the affect that PORN sites had on commerce in the Internet. Many of the technologies used by companies today were pianeered by pornsites.

True. I take it you've read this?

Excite search engine

dial-up

geocities

aol being popular

ICQ

golden age of CHATS

golden age of HOTMAIL/MSN

poor desing, overall, the sites looked amateurish by today's standards

hated/feared p2p file sharing applications like Napster, Freenet, Gnutella, eDonkey, etc, early p2p, before piracy became mainstream/accepted...

early mass-media sites with a limited number of visitors (sport, music, newspapers, etc)

early fan sites, specially of 80s acts...

early multiplayer (Quake I-III Arena, GoldenEye, Unreal, Counter-Strike, etc)

slow as hell 56 kbit/s Dial-Up access (omg!! lolllolol) (it used the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a dialed connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) via telephone lines, from wiki)

Lammastide said:

imago said:

Very, very , VEERRRRRRY likely.

Indie artists had already taken to the Internet by 96/97ish.

I remember yahooing "Alien Sex Fiend" which was well established at the time, but was still surprised how many sites were devoted to them.

But, artists had already taken to the Internet and establishing pages. Messageboard sites also were going crazy with unofficial fansites.

It was "Commerce" that had not yet caught on. Establishing ways to sell services and products was still so-so in 96. By 1999 I remember it being pretty good, but nothing like now.

An interesting thing to do is see the affect that PORN sites had on commerce in the Internet. Many of the technologies used by companies today were pianeered by pornsites.

True. I take it you've read this?

Looks like an interesting book! I must pick it up!