Before Bandcamp and Soundcloud became the de facto standard sites for independent artists looking to host their music online, there were others, like PureVolume, ReverbNation, and of course, Myspace Music. If you’re a musician in your 20s or 30s, there’s a good chance you used one of them (or all three) to share a few really abhorrent songs you recorded into one of those crappy Tascam 8-track digital units in your drummer’s basement. And if you never bothered to delete them, those songs are probably still floating around in the internet ether somewhere. If PureVolume was your platform of choice, you’d better go and download them, because the site just announced that it will be shutting down April 30.
PureVolume was founded in 2003, the same year as Myspace, and enjoyed a few years as one of the dominant music-sharing platforms until Bandcamp and Soundcloud came along four years later. (From 2010 to 2016, it was owned by SpinMedia, which was also Spin’s parent company at the time.) In recent years, it included an editorial section in addition to its music-sharing service, but as Billboard notes, there hasn’t been a new post published there since October. Navigating to the site today, you’ll find a message that reads “”We reget [sic] to inform you that PureVolume.com is shutting down. If you were storing music here, you will have until April 30th, 2018 to download it. Thanks for all your support.”
You heard them. If your long-dormant PureVolume page still contains any lingering crabcore breakdowns, Blink-182 ripoffs, rap-metal embarrassments, super chill acoustic ditties, offensively unfunny hip-hop parodies, barely listenable breakup songs about boys or girls you ate lunch with for a week in 2004, or fitful first stabs at sounding like the Strokes, you have two weeks to go save them before they disappear forever.
