MP3.com was online by December 1997, as a guide to MP3 software and sites with a call: "We are looking for bands which have MP3's of their music." In September 1998 it started Digital Automatic Music: it would press a band's CD when someone ordered it, ship it and pay the band half, without taking ownership of the music. In its annual report for 2000 the company set that "at least a 50% royalty" against the 10 to 15 percent it believed artists usually earned from a label. [1, 2, 3]
On 7 November 1998 the band put "Atomic Dance Explosion" on its MP3.com page, in MP3 and RealAudio, "based on our new sound". The band's biography of 2005 dates the track to December 1998, a month after that release; the difference has not been explained. [1, 2]
In January 1999 it was No. 9 on MP3.com's Top 40, the Beastie Boys "still ahead of us … but not for long". On 25 March the band reported "57,000 downloads in 24 days" and the track at No. 1 within all genres. Two weeks later it counted 4,000 downloads and about 7,000 visits to its page every day. [1]
For April 1999 the page logged 186,973 visits and 129,165 downloads. By the band's reading of MP3.com's statistics that made it the second most popular act on the whole site and the first among European ones. No MP3.com chart page from 1999 has yet been found to check it against. [1]
Downloads were free; the money came from CDs. The band's demo CD, the.demo.cd, went on sale through MP3.com on 10 January 1999, and when the track reached No. 1 the band wrote: "The pay check for the CD sales just arrived and we're gonna use the monney to rebuild our garage and turn it into a studio as a tribute to our fans." Beyond 2000, an album of the MP3.com tracks, followed as an MP3.com CD on 16 August 1999. By 7 November: "In total we've sold 1550 CD's and that figure is still increasing." [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The company went to the stock market. MP3.com's shares, offered at $28, began trading on Nasdaq on 21 July 1999; they opened at $92 and reached $105 that day, when the company was worth nearly $7 billion, Wired reported. In the first quarter of the year it had lost $1.5 million on revenue of $665,785, most of it from advertising. [1, 2]
Labels noticed. In November 1999 the band wrote that it had turned down an offer from Amped Records in the USA "for a number of reasons". Another offer it later counted as a mistake: the German division of Universal Music e-mailed to sign the band, and Alexander, by his own account of 2004, asked what kind of label Universal was. He knew it was one of the largest in the world, he wrote, "however I didn't reflect over it until it was too late". [1, 2, 3]
The listeners were wherever the web was. In May 1999 a radio station in Lima, Peru, played "Beyond 303" and named the demo its "CD of the week", and the band reported that the BBC's Tomorrow's World had featured Atomic Dance Explosion. On 1 December the band wrote that it had been "No. 1 at mp3.com for over 2 months now". [1, 2]