I remember spending my after-school hours poring over the pages and connections, building a mind palace of relationships between bands and labels.
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It was just there for anyone to browse and choose what they wanted, an internet full of a different kind of serendipity than the algorithm-driven kinds we have now. It was like the cool older siblings I never had, a place to explore and understand myself without anyone asking why I cared. My teenage quest for knowledge and being the coolest kid I knew was satisfied in a way I still have trouble describing-looking at these pages now still brings back a visceral reaction for me, a desire to dive in and read every word on these pages.įormer staff critic and current frontman of Okkervil River, Will Robinson Sheff told the Austin Chronicle in 2003: “I felt like if we were going to be giving music away for free, we should be trying to get people to experience the world of independent, cool music outside of the same old crap they hear on the radio.” These highly curated, hyper niche experiences allowed users at the time to open their hearts and ears to music from basements around the world.
Many clicks later, I made it to the Emo hub where there were pages upon pages of bands I could dig into, with “also try” notes under all of them. I found my way to the album it was on, 1999’s Something To Write Home About, and ended up finding it on Audiogalaxy. There was something about the guitar riffs and lyrical hooks that caught my ear. “My Apology” was never my favorite Get Up Kids song, but it’s the first one I remember hearing. With my Weezer-inspired thick black glasses, I ended up on Audiogalaxy looking up a little band from Kansas called The Get Up Kids and my whole life changed. Maybe it was a combination of my early internet days with growing up in New Jersey and its beating heart of pop-punk down the entire length of the Turnpike that led me to my own emo dreams. I started email zines, wrote terrible fanfiction, and roleplayed as a sparkly blue dragon (Sorry, Mom). We had walled-garden AOL and I, somehow, was allowed to use the internet more easily than trying to hang out with my friends IRL. I got my first home computer in 1998 when I was in the sixth grade. At 13, I was no stranger to Napster and KaZaa, and I downloaded enough spam and malware to have a little bit of a handle on what I could get away with. I don’t remember how I came across Audiogalaxy. Neatly categorized and extremely clickable, Audiogalaxy was like walking into a local record store, ready to pick and choose whatever felt right to you, without the judgment of any of the employees. It was user-friendly and built with interconnections in mind, with taxonomies and hierarchies that Wikipedia would go on to make commonplace on the internet. Dark blue and deeply linked, like many of the social media networks that would come after, Audiogalaxy boasted itself to have the web’s best music search. In 2019, NPR called Audiogalaxy the “digital wild west’s best outlaw record store,” and that’s what it felt like. Among all these big names and faceless P2P engines, Audiogalaxy stood out as a unique fixture in the space. Whatever it was, the early aughts had a different relationship to file-sharing than the internet of now. Maybe their weapons of choice were SoulSeek, Limewire, OiNK’s Pink Palace, or just scraping MediaFire.