mp3.druxa.nnov.ru («The Music Page») — a home collection of digitized music recordings made openly available on a subdomain of the personal site druxa.nnov.ru in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone nnov.ru. The site is known from web archive snapshots taken between August 2004 and March 2006[1][4] and from the 2004 vote of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, where 255 votes were cast for it[5].
What the site looked like
The home page was a table of contents for a file catalogue. The main means of navigation was an alphabetical index: a row with a question mark and the digits from 1 to 0, a Latin row and a Cyrillic row — «А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Э Ю Я»[1]. In the surviving snapshots the Latin row is incomplete and contains a typo — the letter Y is missing, while W appears twice: «W X W Z»[1][4].
Besides the alphabet, the visitor was offered selections based on ratings. Already in 2004 the home page announced: «A TOP10 of the most popular tracks is now available. Perhaps what you are looking for is there!»[1]. By 2006 the range of navigation options had grown: the TOP10 was joined by a list of the 50 most recently added tracks, a list of the 50 most recently requested ones and a page called «our CHOICE»[4].
Feedback was arranged in the way customary for personal sites of that period: the e-mail address druxa@druxa.nnov.ru and a guestbook[1], and by September 2004 a forum had appeared on the site as well — «for the discussion of any questions connected with this project», as the home page put it[2]. In 2006 the home page carried thanks for help in creating and updating the collection to two people identified by their online nicknames: alexjdai and Pioneer[4].
A separate block on the home page held a copyright disclaimer: all the material had been «deliberately digitized at reduced quality» and was intended «for introductory listening only», and visitors were asked to respect the rights of the authors, performers and distributors of musical products[1]. This wording remained unchanged in all four known snapshots, right up to 2006[4].
Growth of the collection
At the bottom of the home page a counter of the archive's size was displayed, and it makes it possible to trace how the collection grew over a year and a half:
- 12 August 2004 — 5290 files, 24.20 GB[1];
- 21 September 2004 — 5457 files, 25.30 GB[2];
- 11 April 2005 — 6793 files, 33.17 GB[3];
- 14 March 2006 — 8644 files, 44.76 GB[4].
Between the first and the last known snapshot the number of files grew roughly 1.6 times, and the volume almost doubled. The collection was replenished unevenly: in the month from August to September 2004 it gained 167 files, whereas over the following six months, by April 2005, it gained more than 1300[2][3].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
«The Music Page» belonged to the layer of private projects of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet — not an editorial office and not a company, but a private record library open to anyone who wished to use it. There is a single measurable trace of its prominence: taking part in the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day competition, where the site received 255 votes[5]. The data of the Counter.nn.ru rating, on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based, contains no traffic figure for this address: the site entered the sample precisely through the results of the 2004 Internet Day vote and not through the counter.
How it closed
The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated 14 March 2006[4]; there are no later saved copies. The site gave no advance notice either of a closure or of a move to another address — in the last snapshot it looks like a working project that was still being added to. A liveness check shows that the domain mp3.druxa.nnov.ru no longer exists today: the page does not open, and no successor to the project has been found.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, August 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, September 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)