text: IUMA provided artists who registered with a free URL and web page.  The artists could present their music over the Internet in stream, download, and internet radio format.  Further, it provided an easy-to-use home page for the band and the ability to distribute their music with no bandwidth fees.  Some of the original file formats used to encode the music were WAV, AIFF and MP2.  MP3 was added later as that format became more popular.
  In 2000, IUMA offered US$5,000 to couples who named their baby "Iuma".  Several families took up the offer.
  IUMA flourished, hosting events such as "Music-o-mania", the largest online "Battle of the Bands" ever held. The winners were given rock star treatment, flown to San Francisco to open for Primus at the Fillmore auditorium.
  Early in 2006, the IUMA website disappeared from the Internet. The site had already been closed to new submissions since 2001, when EMusic downsized, eliminating most of the IUMA staff.  Despite this setback, much of IUMA's core group continued to work on a "volunteer" basis, in the hopes that IUMA could be resurrected. IUMA was subsequently purchased in 2002 by Vitaminic, an Italian music company.
  In late May 2012, Jason Scott (founder of Textfiles.com) announced that much of IUMA's collection has been reposted via the Internet Archive. John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), managed to retrieve the surviving files before its shutdown.