In April 2000 the first vinyl came out: Health Warning, a 12-inch on Flash Traxx, a label of Strictly Hype Recordings in Chicago. On 22 August Strictly Hype's Sunrise label released the album Beyond 2001 – the Resurrection. (The band's discography of 2005 says 16 August; its news of April 2000 and its release sheet of 2003 give the 22nd.) [1, 2, 3]
A label meant shops. In the autumn of 2000 listeners wrote in the guestbook that they had seen the new album at the record store, or were going to the mall to get it. The band's biography of 2005 says Beyond 2001 sold about 18,000 copies in the United States and Canada, against the 3,000 the label had projected. [1, 2]
The money never came. In February 2004 Alexander answered a listener in the guestbook, in Swedish: the first album the band released through a label sold about 20,000 copies, which should have brought in about 200,000 kronor, but the label went bankrupt and the band got nothing. Warlock Records bought the bankrupt label's catalogue and reissued Beyond 2001 on 24 September 2002. The band's second album on the label, OUT THERE (2002), was listed in 2003 as "Discontinued due to label crash". [1, 2, 3, 4]
In the same answer he set it against MP3.com. The CDs the band sold there came to about 4,000 copies and brought in about 160,000 kronor, and the downloads were paid for as well. The band, he wrote, had probably done far better as internet artists than it would have done with a label. [1]
MP3.com paid for listening through Payback for Playback, started in November 1999: a sum each month, $1 million a month from May 2000, shared out by how many different users listened to each artist, with at least 15 such listens a day needed to earn. By its annual report the company made $9.2 million available this way up to the end of 2000. ABC News reported that 39 of its roughly 150,000 artists made more than $20,000 each from it that year; the top earner, 303infinity, made $165,392.92. [1, 2, 3]
The record companies went after the platform. In January 2000 MP3.com launched My.MP3, which let users play CDs they owned from an online locker, and on 21 January ten major record companies sued. The court found MP3.com liable on 28 April; four of the labels settled that summer, and in November Universal was awarded $53.4 million in damages and fees. MP3.com booked $170 million for litigation and copyright matters in 2000, and its shares, $105 on their first day, had sunk to $2.50 in October. In May 2001 Vivendi Universal agreed to buy the company for $372 million, $5 a share, and completed the purchase on 28 August. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
It was the end of the dot-com boom. The Nasdaq Composite index, where MP3.com had been listed, closed at a record 5,048.64 on 10 March 2000 and at 1,114.11 on 9 October 2002, 78 percent below its peak. [1, 2, 3]
Other doors opened, and some closed. The band's remix of MOVE's "Rage your Dream" came out on Avex Trax in Japan in March 2000. In 2001 Sony approached the band about music for the PlayStation 2 game Frequency; by the band's account the contribution did not go ahead because its manager at the time did not follow up. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Between the label albums the band released its own, on trance[]control Productions: Audiographic Moments in July 2001, and from June 2002 the MISSION 2002 series. [1]
Royalties were a small part of it. When a listener in Korea heard a cheap copy of Atomic Dance Explosion on the SBS news in October 2003, Alexander answered that "1% of the airtime we get actually ends up paying royalty to us". His own rule ran the other way from the labels': "As for your theory on try before you buy - it's been my motto all the way... And yes, it works well for us." [1, 2]