On 26 November 1999 the band stood on a stage for the first time, at a party for the PlayStation game Wipeout 3 at Medborgarhuset in Stockholm. "The WIP3OUT Party was a complete success even though only 280 people showed up," it wrote. It played for 28 minutes, and its own cameraman filmed the set. [1, 2]
The listeners wrote in a guestbook at theguestbook.com, linked from the band's site. It held 1,030 entries by 8 March 2000, 1,961 by 5 October and 2,182 by 4 December. The thirty entries the Internet Archive kept come from the United States, Britain, Norway, Germany, Hong Kong, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Basque Country, Canada, Croatia, Malaysia and Ecuador. [1]
They say how people found the music. One writer had found the band "over Napster just by chance" and then saw the new release "at the record store"; another had bought Beyond 2000 from Amazon.com the year before; a third bought the CD "cuz I heard your mp3's online". [1]
Napster had started in June 1999. At its peak, in February 2001, Media Metrix counted 26.4 million users in 14 countries; that July, after the record companies' lawsuits, it closed its file-trading network. [1, 2, 3]
In April 2000 the band called itself "a band more or less born on the internet and at the same time depending on the internet". It had no promoter, it wrote, and did not intend to get one; listeners were asked to help bring it to their areas. The same news announced its first show in the United States. [1]
On 3 June 2000 it played PLURFEST 2000 – Vol. 1 PEACE in Fort Collins, Colorado, its "very first US live PA". Alexander remembers about 5,000 people and the band as the headliner; no report from the night itself has been found. A month later it was in Berlin for the Love Parade weekend, booked by European Entertainment for its party Paradise City IV, and in September at the SYSTEM 7 party in Ottawa. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]