mnemonic.Nizhny.ru Information Service (nizhny.ru) — a site about computer music and music software that operated from the early 2000s to the end of that decade. The home page from 2003 presented it as the "Mnemonic Music Site | Portal of the Modern Musician"[2]. It belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod segment of the internet on two grounds: it lived in the nizhny.ru domain zone, and under the second of its names it was registered as a participant of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day in 2004, in the "Best Personal Website" category[3]. An early snapshot names 4 August 2000 as the founding date[1], while the caption at the bottom of the page read "Copyright © 2000-2002 iTEX Design Studio, Greg [mnemonic] Zemskov"[2].

Early years: trackers and samples

The snapshot from 1 April 2001 is nearly empty: what survives of the page is the title, fragments of code for the up.ru and Top100 counters, and the line "Created on 04 August 2000"[1]. What the site covered in this period is suggested by the page's service descriptions, which list "music tracker mp3 it wav documentation faqs russian english links free hardware software," while the Russian keyword list includes "samples loops documentation," "trackers sounds sound GUS sound blaster," "acid jazz rock pop metal bossa nova hip-hop rap techno"[1]. The list outlines the range of topics from the first years: tracker music, sound formats, documentation, and "freebies" — the term used in the list itself.

Portal of the Modern Musician

By 2003 the site had grown into a full-fledged themed portal. The home page menu listed the sections "books," "sound / mastering," "misc. synthesizers," "music editors," "music hardware," "trackers," "dancefloor," "storeroom," "samples," "tracker music," "my music," "plug-in's," "software," "forum," "links," "business card," "mailing list," "announcements," "guestbook," and "catalog"[2]. As the home page put it, the site offered "a description of modern music software: samplers, software synthesizers, trackers, new releases, and much more"[2]. There was also a search function with two toggles — "on this site" and "on Yandex"[2].

The news feed for spring and summer 2003 shows what the site lived on: 11 April — "Sound Forge 4.5 > Mixing several files into one," 14 April — "Sound Forge 4.5 > Resampling," 24 April — "Secrets of low-budget music production technologies — how to get good sound on a multimedia computer," 28 and 29 April — three parts of a series on sampling, 7 May — four parts of an article on GigaSampler "from scratch," 13 May — a piece about Cool Edit[2]. From 25 June to 1 August ran a series of no fewer than six parts titled "FruityLoops 4 > Make your hit"[2]. A separate line in the news read, on housekeeping matters: "Cleared out dead links in the 'links' section"[2].

The site was openly looking for money to sustain itself. As the home page stated, the owner was ready to buy "original articles on music topics for placement on this site in exchange for impressions in the music banner-exchange network," and sold impressions in that same network "at a price of $0.5 per 1000 impressions (real value $1 per 1000)," adding "negotiable"[2]. Banner and link exchange with other music sites was also offered, and at the bottom of the page sat a block of categories unrelated to the topic — "amplifiers," "minidisc decks," "cd players," "car audio," "DVD," "partnership"[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet 2004, the "Portal of the Modern Musician" at mnemonic.nizhny.ru appears at number 175 in the "Best Personal Website" category, with 52 votes by email and none by SMS[3]. That is the eighth line of thirty-seven entrants in the category: above it stood "Nizhny Novgorod Extreme on the Internet" with 156 votes, the "Cherny Pyos" ("Black Dog") quintet with 114, and the "Well Photo Project" with 109; below it, the site "All the Riddles of Carlos Castaneda" and the official website of Yevgeny Gurin, both with 38 votes[3].

In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating in our records, no entry for this site appears, so there is nothing to judge its traffic by within the scale of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet; the general context of that statistics is examined in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. In content, the site was not local but nationwide in scope: the surviving pages contain no local topics, addresses, or phone numbers.

Relocation and closure

By the summer of 2006 there was no longer a substantive site at the address. The snapshot from 1 July 2006 shows a page of two lines: "We've moved! New address www.music4sale.ru"[4]. Below the relocation notice was a list of links no longer connected to music software: "free backing tracks," "music catalog," "cottage, cottage rental," "cottage sales," "build a cottage"[4]. The domain lived out its remaining days as a link farm.

The latest snapshot recorded in our dossier is dated 13 February 2009; by then all that remained of the page was a single service line: "This site requires JavaScript support"[5]. The page no longer had a title or a description. What became of the project after its move to music4sale.ru is not recorded in our materials.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2009 (archive)