Having learnt Steinberg's Cubase Audio VST, they sent out their first demo. On 18 October 1998 they signed with Frontline Music Publishing, which took the rights to "Fragment of Time" and "Virtual Love". The same week the band published two pieces written for PK2oons, a freeware game by Third Eye Entertainment. [1, 2]
The story › One thread
The music business
Labels, CDs, downloads and fees: what the band earned, what it expected and what never came.
InternetBusinessPlatformsTechnology
0. A 386 and an AWE32 1995–1998
1. Number 749 1998–1999
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]
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]
2. The first stage, the first guestbook 1999–2000
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]
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]
3. A label deal, and no money 2000–2002
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]
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]
4. Robbed 2001–2003
6. When the platform closed October–December 2003
MP3.com had belonged to Vivendi Universal since 2001, and on 15 January 2003 it had stopped paying artists for listens. On 13 November 2003 CNET Networks announced that it had acquired "certain assets" of the company. [1, 2, 3]
Ten million plays never showed on the counter. In December Alexander wrote that he was "pretty sure we broke that boundry", since November alone had given over 220,000 downloads. The biography of 2005 states it as fact, calling the band "the only artist to reach over 10,000,000 valid downloads from MP3.com". The ten million is the band's own estimate for the last weeks. [1, 2]
7. The Vault 2004
In June the paid part opened. "Due to intense pressure from people who scream for VIP Access" the VIP Vault pre-opened on 4 June 2004, at $12 a year. Alexander set out the arithmetic: a retail CD bought in a shop left the band about $1, a VIP subscription about $10. Bandwidth and servers, the band reminded those who asked, "actually cost money for us". [1, 2, 3]
8. London and the 12-inch 2004–2005
In September 2004 the band's site announced a new booking agency, and the next day a performance in London. On 5 October came "the first truly confirmed booking in a long time": Massive at Heaven, under the arches of Villiers Street, on 19 November. It was the band's second time in London; the first had been the Rocket Complex on Holloway Road in June 2003. [1, 2, 3]
The bill had three rooms and a VIP area, with the band live in the uplifting trance room beside DuMonde, Cosmic Gate, The Warp Brothers, Airbase and Conti. "We had a great night," it wrote when it was home. [1, 2]
Heaven had a second date, 17 December, billed as the launch party for a new label, Massive Trax, whose first 12-inch would be the band's "Sunrise". Promo copies went to DJs and radio stations. The record was not yet in the shops: in February 2005 the band wrote that the sale had been put off until the Winter Music Conference in Miami in March. [1, 2]
9. Then and now 2006–today
In September 2006 Alexander released a new track, "ReLoad", in the VIP Vault and wrote that he had taken "a very long break from music production". In April 2007 trance[]control Productions and his web design company moved into an office in Gothenburg, with "a member database of clsoe to 10k individuals". [1, 2]
In 2012 Alexander set up a new studio, a 3×4 metre soundproofed room in central Gothenburg, and announced an upgrade paid for by that year's music sales: all revenue would "go back into the project instead of spending it on coffee and pizza". In August he drove off to fetch a 32-channel Soundcraft Ghost console. [1, 2, 3]
The terms have changed since MP3.com's half of a CD. Bandcamp takes 15 percent of a digital sale, 10 once an artist has sold $5,000, plus card fees, and says that on average 82 percent of what fans pay reaches the artist or label. Spotify pays no fixed rate per stream: it says rights holders share about two thirds of its music revenue according to their share of all streams, and that in 2025 one stream in every million was worth $11,000 on average. Since 2024 a track there earns nothing until it has had 1,000 streams in a year. [1, 2, 3, 4]