The artist and the internet

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The band's own accounts agree on the place and the year: Gothenburg, 1997, and the cousins Alexander Carlborg and Andreas Wennersköld. They differ on the season. The biography the band wrote in June 2000 says the "amateur basement project" was founded in the second half of 1997, as Alexander also remembers it; the press kit of 2003 and the website of 2005 say early 1997. ^{[1, 2, 3, 4]}

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What money there was went into gear: a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with 12 MB for samples, then the first real synthesizer, a Yamaha CS1x. Reading up on it, the two found the CS1x Archive on the web and mailed it their own tracks: "the first step towards the WWW was taken". A Roland MC-303, a Pentium at 166 MHz and an Alesis Quadrasynth followed, all of it paid for by Alexander. ^[1]

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By then the band was online. In August 1998, by Alexander's account, it joined MP3.com, where its artist page was number 749 in the Techno section. From 3 October 1998 its first website of its own, on web space a friend had arranged at teraxis.se, counted the visitors. ^{[1, 2, 3]}

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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]}

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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]

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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]}

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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]}

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]}

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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]}

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From August 2001 the studio was online: "We've mounted a webcam sending out both video and audio around the clock", the band's site said of its Studio CAM, and Alexander later wrote that he had sent the stream to the internet radio station DI.fm "so that they could distribute our signal further". ^{[1, 2]}

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Listeners asked how to help, and the band set up a donation page. By February 2003 it held $392.25; by 12 April, $1,169.58, and the new computer was "RUNNING IN THE STUDIO!": an Intel P4 at 2.4 GHz with 1,024 MB of RAM and a 120 GB disk. ^{[1, 2, 3]}

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When "Lobotomized Unicorn", MISSION 2002 Release #19, came out on 24 September 2003, it was dedicated to the donors: "Major credits to all of you who donated your hard earned money so that we where able to buy a new computer". Some work never came back. An unfinished WennE track, "Lindas Theme", "was never fully completed before our gear was stolen". ^{[1, 2]}

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In September 2003 the band's old message board at epic-media.com "seemed to get overloaded or something - either way it stoped working properly", and on 24 September Alexander installed a new one, an Invision Power Board at trancecontrol.com/forum. By 9 October it had almost 800 posts. ^{[1, 2]}

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The database, kept in the band's server backup, holds 516 topics and 4,167 posts in the boards visitors could read, up to July 2004. In them the band announced every release, gig and setback, and the members wrote back. They identified the tracks in the live sets by ear, and when Alexander thought of Windows Media for the downloads they argued for MP3 and Ogg instead: MP3 stayed the main format, with Ogg as well, at 160 kbps, which in his view was "more then enough". ^{[1, 2, 3]}

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The listeners made their own radio. In October 2003 forum members put together a live mix show, and DI.fm offered to carry it: "DI.fm will host & promote the whole thing!" ^[1]

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The forum was also where the band told of its nights abroad. From Montreal, on 4 October 2003, Alexander wrote that the computer had crashed ten minutes before the set and that the band went on two hours late, at about 5 am, and that "we've never seen such response before ever!" ^[1]

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"I'm more concernd about how trance[]control is totally connected to MP3.com and vice versa - what'll happend when that connection break?" Alexander wrote. He spent that night downloading all 54 of the band's tracks, taking screenshots and saving the pages. He looked at Ampcast, beatmaka.com and CD Baby, and since he had a 10 Mbit line at home, he thought of hosting the songs himself. ^[1]

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Days before the end, on 28 November, MP3.com's front page featured the band's "UNICORN R.I.P" and named the band first of five acts under the heading "The Best Original MP3.com Native Artist is::". From 2 December the address showed a letter from CNET: no music for the time being, and new artist services promised for the following year at another site. The founder, Michael Robertson, had tried and failed to save the archive, which The Register put at the work of 250,000 artists. ^{[1, 2, 3]}

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On 17 December 2003, two weeks after MP3.com shut, the band opened its own download area at trancecontrol.com/mp3 as a "sneak-preview". The forum's passwords were encrypted and could not be carried over, so it got "a quick register / login interface that also will be used for our new mailing list". The band's web space had just been raised to 500 MB. ^{[1, 2]}

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The MP3 Vault grew faster than anything the band had run: over 780 members by 14 January 2004, over 1,150 by 30 January, more than 2,500 by late March, 4,000 on 13 June and more than 5,000 on 22 August, with close to 40,000 log-ins since the start. On 22 October, at "5,600+", idle accounts were given 24 hours to update themselves; the rest were to be deleted. ^{[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]}

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The listeners met its limits. "I have been getting mostly 'HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected' all day," one wrote that day. "Don't mind the slow download, but would like to at least be connected." The next day Alexander installed "a new un-capped webserver". On 26 March he apologised again: "Right now I'm on a 10Mbit connection and 2,500+ registered users will probably make that a bit slow." Another listener answered in April: "Don't worry about slow downloads, it's worth the wait." ^{[1, 2, 3]}

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The guestbook beside the Vault kept 232 entries between February and July 2004. A listener wrote that the music was "known in Siberia situated in Russia"; another was "the one and only fan" in the Maldives; another had kept the first track downloaded from MP3.com years before. ^[1]

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On stage the year was mixed: about 250 people in a hall for 4,500 at Club Sensation in Borås in April, and a float at the Love Parade that was cancelled with the whole parade, "Due to a lack of financial resources". The live set from Borås went into the Vault the next day. On 16 July 2004 a new trancecontrol.com went online, built around the agenda, the discography and the two Vaults; by April 2005 it counted 5,429 members registered for Vault access. ^{[1, 2, 3]}

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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]}

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In October 2005 the band played Massive Intent in Sacramento, California. Announcing it in June, it wrote that its last US performance had been PLURFEST 2000. ^[1]

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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]}