Born on the internet

trance[]control began as what its own biography of 2000 calls "an amateur basement project": two cousins in Gothenburg, Alexander Carlborg, DjC, and Andreas Wennersköld, WennE, making trance on a computer that "sucked even back then". It went online almost at once. In August 1998, by Alexander's account, the band joined MP3.com, where its artist page got the number 749 in the Techno section, and from 3 October 1998 its first website of its own, on web space a friend had arranged at teraxis.se, counted its visitors.^1,2,3,4,5

MP3.com itself was barely a year old. Its front page of December 1997 was a guide to MP3 software and sites, with a call at the bottom: "We are looking for bands which have MP3's of their music." The band was one of the bands that answered, and the site became its main channel for the next five years.^6,7

Number 1 out of everyone

On 7 November 1998 the band put up "Atomic Dance Explosion", "based on our new sound". In January 1999 the track stood at No. 9 on MP3.com's Top 40, with 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 No. 1 spot within all genres, and two weeks later it counted 4,000 downloads and about 7,000 visits to its page every day. (The band's own biography of 2005 dates the track to December 1998, a month after that release; the difference has never been explained.)^4,8

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. The listeners were wherever the web was: in May a radio station in Lima 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.⁵

“Now, we've been No. 1 at mp3.com for over 2 months now and the stats never seem to drop!”

The guestbook

The listeners wrote back. The band's first guestbook, at theguestbook.com and linked from the Teraxis site, 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 happened to keep come from the United States, Britain, Norway, Germany, Hong Kong, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Basque Country, Canada, Croatia, Malaysia and Ecuador, and they tell how people found the music. One writer had come across 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; a third bought the CD "cuz I heard your mp3's online". Read the guestbook of 2000.¹⁰

In April 2000 the band summed itself up in one line: "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 part of the world. The same news announced its first show in the United States, which is where the stage article picks up.¹¹

A webcam in the studio, a forum on fire

From August 2001 the studio itself 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".^12,13

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 forum at trancecontrol.com. "This forum is on FIRE!" he wrote on 9 October, when it already held almost 800 posts. Four days later it lost much of what it held, "about 90 of the old topics are gone, lost, vanished", and carried on. Its own database, kept in the band's server backup, holds 516 topics and 4,167 posts up to July 2004, and they can be read again in the Time Machine.^14,15,16,17

In the forum the band announced every release, gig and setback, and the members answered. They identified the tracks in the live sets by ear. They put together a live mix show of their own, and DI.fm offered to carry it: "DI.fm will host & promote the whole thing!" When Alexander thought of Windows Media for the downloads, they argued for MP3 and Ogg instead, and MP3 stayed.^18,13,19

The Vault

When MP3.com shut on 2 December 2003 (how that happened), the band opened its own download area two weeks later, on 17 December, as a "sneak-preview" at trancecontrol.com/mp3. 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".^20,7

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 before the rest were deleted.^{21,22,23,24,25,26}

It all ran from one machine on a 10 Mbit line, and the listeners felt it. "I have been getting mostly 'HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected' all day," one wrote on 1 March 2004. "Don't mind the slow download, but would like to at least be connected." Alexander answered in the same guestbook, installed a new web server the next day and apologised again in March, with 2,500 members on the line. The technology article has the machine and the numbers.^27,23

“Thanks for all the hard work to make the music and keep it free. Don't worry about slow downloads, it's worth the wait.”

That guestbook kept 232 entries between February and July 2004. A listener wrote that the band's music was "known in Siberia situated in Russia"; another was "the one and only fan" in the Maldives; another still had the first track downloaded from MP3.com years before. Read the Vault's guestbook.²⁸

The site was rebuilt around the Vault on 16 July 2004, and by April 2005 it counted 5,429 members registered for access. In September 2006, after what Alexander called "a very long break from music production", a new track, "ReLoad", went into the VIP Vault, and in April 2007 he wrote of a member database of close to ten thousand.^29,30,31