text: The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was an organization that provided a venue for unsigned artists to share their music and communicate with their audience. IUMA is widely recognized as the birthplace of online music.  IUMA's goal was to help independent artists use the Internet to distribute their music to fans while circumventing the usual distribution model of using a record company. IUMA was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.
  IUMA originally existed as FTP and Gopher sites, before the World Wide Web was widely used. On March 9, 1994 CNN featured IUMA in their "Showbiz News" segment. In June 1999, IUMA was purchased by EMusic, and moved operations from Santa Cruz to Redwood City, home of the EMusic offices.