Hopefully, you've enjoyed this peek behind the curtain of music internet publishing 20 years ago. This is what a website project looked like back then. I plan to post more anecdotes as certain anniversaries approach, as we're about to hit 25 years ago for some projects.

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Twenty years ago, global internet bandwidth was limited. Launching these kinds of video projects was cutting-edge, and while we measured success on the visitor metrics, we often got reports back from Akamai on how much our releases had slowed down their network and the rest of the internet. 😅

And then came the pause... I turned to watching the tailed web log files for the first visitors.

Nothing…

Nothing…

*Ping*

All of a sudden, the stream of visitors began flowing and started gathering pace. Very soon, 100s of visitors had become 1000s. I breathed a sigh of relief of relief!

The video faded to black on the TV, and I punched the button, heart pounding, full of doubts about my code and implementation. The web files were small, so it only took a minute to sync... I loaded the live site, and all seemed to be working, at least for me. Thank F… for that!

With no time for any testing, I got the files ready for upload. Back then, there were no CI/CD pipelines, no automated testing and no Git repos. We pushed files out manually. I put the TV on and hovered over the 'Upload' button in Panic's Transmit FTP client, waiting for the video to air.

With less than an hour to go, the compression run finished, and I started uploading the files to Akamai (an early edge-caching CDN). We had moved to this part of Shropshire because it was a BT test area for broadband, and I was using two bonded ADSL lines to improve speeds. Upload finished at ~20:50

I made him a coffee for the journey back to London, grabbed the DV tape, and started the capture and compression run, now starting to panic a bit, because it was not a fast process and it had to be done 3 times for different bandwidths: modem, broadband and a higher quality version for download.

Three and a half hours later, there was a knock at the door, and a very confused Addison-Lee driver nervously asked if he had found the right place - it was now dark, and he had to navigate his way around many tiny country lanes to find us.

However, at 9 am on the day, the video was still being edited, and I had recently moved from London to the middle of nowhere, Shropshire.

At around 2pm, I was told it was ready and a DV tape containing the video was on the way with a London courier.

This was going to be tight.

The release of Kate Bush's "King of the Mountain", the first single off "Aerial", was quite the event. The music video premiered exclusively on Channel 4 at 9 pm, followed by its online release via my QuickTime player engine, requiring many hours of capture, compression and uploading time.

As the browser was still pants at playing audio and video, I created a custom QuickTime Player with "LiveStage Professional". I created a range of these for many artists, winning an Apple Design Award in 2004 for Robbie Williams' "Live at Knebworth".

LCD Soundsystem was a fun project - I really tried to capture the lo-fi and punk elements of the band and its label, DFA. I also deliberately didn't use Flash, choosing to use raw HTML and (largely broken) CSS. It was also the first site I got working on mobile, using WAP 😅

Back then, the web was the Wild West of interactive design - Flash was still ubiquitous, and audio and video handling was, frankly, a mess and mostly done with QuickTime. Modems were still common, and broadband was only 512Kbps. Everything had to be cleverly optimised to give the illusion of speed.