IUMA’S THROUGH, MAN
The company announced that, as of Feb. 7, it had suspended operations. On the IUMA homepage, the link to the letter from Founder Jeff Patterson and General Manager Antony Brydon is accompanied by a picture of the Titanic sinking—an image that is simultaneously boastful and foreboding.
Cast adrift by equally struggling EMusic, it appears the music site may not live to see the first birthdays of the 10 babies recently named after it (hitsdailydouble.com, 11/7).
Below is the better part of the message from Patterson and Brydon:
"We regret to inform you that we have been forced to close the IUMA community to new artists. Severe cutbacks in funding from EMusic in early January (hitsdailydouble.com, 1/12) have made it impossible to maintain the quality and consistency of many IUMA services. Since then, we have made exhaustive attempts to find another partner, but the short timeframe has made this extremely difficult, and we have been forced to scale operations to the bare minimum.
"When EMusic acquired IUMA in June of 1999, they agreed to fund our growth through the end of 2000. Unfortunately, due to the current state of the industry, EMusic has decided not to renew our funding going forward. Without their funding, we're unable to maintain the quality of service we've been known for in the past and have had to eliminate the entire staff.
"Consequently, while we work on finding new sources of funding for IUMA, we are closing the community to new artists and eliminating many of our services. We think that you will find this a mixed blessing. On one hand, some programs and site features will be cut; including anything that required human interaction—CD sales, customer support, new artist submissions, etc. On the other hand, the site will look and feel the same, artist pages will still be functional, existing artists will still be able to modify their sites, and fans will be focused on a core group of artists who are featured more regularly.
"It pains us to have to resort to these drastic measures, but it seems we have no other choice. If, by doing this we can live to fight another day, the decision will be worthwhile… We'd like to thank you for being part of our most successful year to date and we hope to be here to serve you again soon."
