Release date: October 1999
Description: This was sold at least in Wal-Marts. It was worked on by a group in Vancouver, and part of how you know that is the list of artists on this CD includes a lot from Vancouver.
My impression of the software is that it was fundamentally sound and not flashy (relative to these kinds of programs, at least). What’s most interesting about it is that not all the artists knew they were on this CD.
I only found this out because I talked to one of the people whose work was on this CD. A lot of the electronic songs on here were taken from mp3.com (so many that I’ve been wondering for years if I owned this CD at some point, or did they just take from a Most Played kind of list?). And one of them was an instrumental called “Blabber” by an artist named Pellucid, and with no words or any memory of anything but the tune there was no chance I was ever going to remember it. And it showed up on here and blew my mind! As it turned out, the CD-ROM had artist credits listed in a Word document (the usual way one does it?), and Pellucid was a guy named Arliss Renwick. Suspecting the world only has one Arliss Renwick, I reached out on Twitter and explained how I caught up with him and my software collecting and all that.
That was the first time he’d heard of his inclusion on the CD.
That was the first time he found out he’d been mass distributed in stores.
20 years later, I was breaking the success of his exposure to him.
It was an unique experience.
Whatever the mechanisms were, they led to a pretty interesting and diverse set of songs. As much as I adore MMJB as a series, I think Valusoft might have put in the most effort – there’s definitely a sense of outperforming expectation. Whatever their exact relationship with mp3.com artists, getting some of the most popular songs over on that side was good quality control. And I appreciated having so many of these songs come back to me like it was yesterday.
That’s enough of me talking about this one in general. On with…
The songs
Because Valusoft wasn’t aligning themselves with internet music providers, the CD-ROM didn’t sort the music by provider. Instead, it sorted – sensibly – by genre. So I will use the same breakdown in listing the 111 songs (advertised as 100 songs, rather than “over 110 songs”).
Classical (6 songs)
| Artist | Songs | Notes |
| Charlie Sneller | Homeward Trail Raindrops | General orchestral pieces that you might have been popular in a YouTube film library if any of those concepts had existed in 1999. |
| Franz Vorraber, Piano | Prelude #8 Raindrop Prelude #15 | Both Chopin pieces. Chopin seems really popular in these compilations. |
| Michael Lorimer | Capricho Arabe Memories (Recuerdos de la Alhambra) | Solo acoustic guitar pieces that are based in flamenco. They keep interest well. |
Country (14 songs)
| Artist | Song(s) | Notes |
| Allison Shields | A Little Too Far I’ll Carry You | One perky song, one ballad. Her voice is huskier than what I’m used to in country. |
| Don Herman | Blisters and Calluses(take2) Better keep my day job | One of these starts with a truck noise and him saying, “Let’s gooooo t-ruckin’!” with not a lot of conviction. But they seem good enough examples of the genre – I just don’t have a good entry point of appreciation for it. |
| Garret Swayne | Email Female Mr. Next-Best-Thing | “Email Female” has the same amount of concept behind it as the Disney show “Dog with a Blog.” Take a new tech word that rhymes with a being people like to talk about, and presto! |
| The Griffins | Railway Song | |
| Kentucky Thunder | 18 Bottles of Beer | |
| Kevin Dunn | Caroline | |
| LOVETRAIN | Stumblin’ | Got a pretty cool violin (or fiddle?) lead that trades off with a clean electric guitar lead. |
| Rhonda Watson | Talkin’ On the Telephone That’s My Man | |
| Stickshift Rocketship | Johnny Cash Machine | I like the song name. And the band name, actually. |
| Violet Ray | Good Things | This is the poppiest one – the one you could most hear moving into Faith Hill territory. |
Hip Hop (13 songs, though 10 are labeled as Rap in the files themselves)
| Artist | Song(s) | Notes |
| Ashianti | Mic Me Rip Up | The only female rap I’ve heard on these compilations. |
| Crucial HeartBreak | No Where to Run | |
| DJ Allstar | Tangerine | Listed genre is “Instrumental Hip Hop,” which is accurate. (It would be weird for a labeled instrumental not to be, but we’ve seen the “level of care” in these compilations before.) |
| Illuminati | All Eyes on Me Nutty | These tracks, like a lot in this folder, have more layers in them than MMJB’s or Siren’s rap songs. Interesting that it’s noticeable. |
| Scottie Knoxx | First Battle Glass of Wine | |
| Soma Sonic | Blue Skies | Listed as Trip-Hop when you get to the genres. Which makes sense; it doesn’t sound like it belongs with the rest of the folder. But if you’re going to call the electronic music folder Techno, you’ve painted yourself into your own corner. It’s off an album called Future that’s on Spotify, and it seems pretty good. |
| The Shady Dude | Jazzband Wha Cha Gon Do? | Instrumental Hip Hop listed for both, though the latter is more like deep house. |
| Tourus Mob | Don’t Change | |
| Vitamin C | Footsteps Gotta Let It Off | Soundcloud informs me this is “Gfunk West coast style.” The main thing to know is that it is NOT the Vitamin C who became famous in 1999 (the year this CD-ROM was released) for her song “Smile.” |
Jazz (13 songs – the folder has four files called Jazz.m3u, Jazz.lst, Jazz1.lst, and Jazz2.lst that don’t have corresponding files in any other folder)
| Artist | Song(s) | Notes |
| Acoustic World Ensemble | Sweet Samba | It’s pleasant. |
| Al Molina Quintet | Miles Like Sonny’s Samba | The samba is better than the other track, which has some nice bits but doesn’t come together. |
| Dave Martone | Free Bop B52 | Listed under Fusion, and they actually are. Really nice prog-metal guitars underneath it. These are an absolute highlight across compilations, as the style’s not well represented. (The loud guitar songs tend to be punk.) |
| Lew Jones | Ocean Peaches/Blackberry Beaches Can’t Believe You Don’t Love Me Anymore | Listed as Acoustic Blues. The former track is much more acoustic and twangy (and I like it more, and the latter track is much more blues. |
| No Time Ensemble | Anything No Canon | The latter song has a bit more energy but meanders. Do you prefer a high-floor or high-ceiling song? |
| Rainer Schnelle Band | Excursions 1 (Niling) Zeitraum | |
| Tommy Stark | I Promise Not to Hold You When You’re Dying shooting star | Why did only one of these get capitalization? These are of the loungey vocal jazz persuasion, but the vocals aren’t particularly smooth. That’s a different mood than I’m used to, and I don’t know how I feel about it. |
Pop (23 songs)
| Artist | Song(s) | Notes |
| Andrea | Natural Instinct (Baby) Remember Me | “Natural Instinct (Baby)” was also on RealJukebox’s compilation of the same year as an R&B song. Remember Me is a lot more early ’90s ballad. It’s meh, but Andrea’s vocals are really good on top of it. |
| Chino | Everything | More R&B |
| Color Theory | New Year’s Eve Stare Out the Window | One of the best-known internet-famous musicians from these compilations, but it’s because he went viral through file-sharing sites for being Martin Gore of Depeche Mode. It’s easier (and funnier!) if you read his explanation: (https://colortheory.bandcamp.com/album/color-theory-presents-depeche-mode) I didn’t know any of that, but I had heard these songs before, and I have no idea where from. |
| Cosmicity | Fate and Time | |
| Eddie Hall | Heartbeat Let Your Love Shine Down Remix (featuring Döylana) | The first song is very slow jam R&B; the remix is a chunky house beat that is more interesting than I expected. Döylana generally sings on either side of the stereo mix while Eddie sings in the middle; that’s a cool idea. |
| Graham! | Stupid Girl | Not a cover of the Garbage song. It’s an intimate song mostly done on electric guitar. |
| Greta Gaines | FireFly | Pop that moves at trip hop speed. I’d call this oversung, but she’s still releasing albums with more listeners than me, so what do I know? |
| Iris | Saving Time Danger Is the Shame | Now this band sounds hugely like Depeche Mode and have albums as recently as 2020. There’s not a lot of pitch correction in the singing on otherwise reasonably polished tracks, which makes them great encapsulations of mp3.com-era electronic music. This is another pair of songs I knew well back in the day and was surprised to hear them again, especially “Danger Is the Shame” – I really liked that one in college and get massive nostalgia vibes off it. |
| MadelynIris | ShadowOfYourLove | Also on the RealJukebox CD. |
| Neuroactive | Visualize (w/Geoff Pinckney) Parallel (Dancefloor RMX) | They’re both decent – they also like Depeche Mode but keep it a bit crisper and EBM-influenced. |
| Silverman | Gun At My Head I get nervous | The kind of trip hop that’s just too slow for me to sync up with. But it’s pretty lush. |
| The Bliss | Crazy | |
| The Echoing Green | Defender (Adamantium Mix) | Full-on EBM. |
| The Nine | Eternal Insane | Another song I knew well in college – well enough that I had a song whose music I very much rooted in this song (I can see that looking back, but I’m not sure how much I knew then – I certainly didn’t write about it in my commentary for that album). I absolutely would have thought this band would go on to loads of things. Some of them went on to a band called Tenek, I am informed by a YouTube uploader of this song. This is another huge nostalgia track for me, sort of a British-voiced version of Orgy. |
| Tinmen | We could’ve danced all night | |
| Toika Gonet | Everyday Tell Me Again | R&B and Rhythmic Soul, respectively. |
Rock (19 songs)
| Artist | Song(s) | Notes |
| The Gears | I’m So Gone The Kids Don’t Want to Grow Old | “I’m So Gone” is sung like “Love Me Do.” And I very randomly had heard this song before. |
| GIRL NEXT DOOR | Gorgeous (Slipcritical Mix) I Fall Down | |
| Gossamer | Shell Full of Sand | Acoustically panoramic. I want to like it, but something doesn’t fully add up for me. |
| The Griffins | overnighter | Enough rock to go here instead of Country. |
| The Hollowheads | Why Did You Come Here? | The funky drum shuffle and electric guitar licks go very pleasantly together, and the chords go weird too. I like this one, though I don’t know it well. |
| LOVETRAIN | Typical Man | |
| MadelynIris | New Day | She’s ubiquitous! |
| New Big Shoes | Smilin’ All The Way Year Book | Okay, now this sounds like the rock all over these kinds of compilations. These are all right. |
| Sajes Myned | Undying Love | Punk with a sort of Gwen Stefani voice shouting things. |
| Stickshift Rocketship | Monkey People | Yes, they were also in the Country folder, but this song’s quite different – like, is-that-the-same-band? different. |
| Tommy and the Stompers | Cambria Undertow | Really good instrumental rock. They only made the one mp3.com CD. |
| The Torpedoes | Big Blue The Snake | Surf-style stuff. |
| Umbrellaheads | Art of Living Hard Luck Story #5 |
Techno (15 songs)
| Artist | Song(s) | Notes |
| 303-Reactor | Confusion2 Dance the Trance | Feels like they’re missing a few layers. |
| Adri | Existential Elf (Drop Modulation Remix) | This is Adriane Lake, whose mention of this software on her website is the only way I know that it was “Available in all Wal-Mart stores across North America.” Both tracks are interesting in different ways – in particular, “Existential” sounds like a highly swung Global Communication that likes to get more abrasive, maybe like if Biosphere’s Dropsonde were influenced by UK garage instead of jazz. |
| Drop Modulation | Wildflowers | Ok, so we just saw their name doing a remix. Now, they’re in their own right and…contributing a 23-minute song! What’s up? Well, it turns out that Adri was part of the group making this compilation in the first place (under another last name, she is credited for “Front End design”). So she picked the band that remixed her and stuck a long ambient piece on. Why not? It was presumably free/a favor for her to get, and it was 42.7 MB she didn’t have to think about. It’s a decent song too – good if you like both Ishqamatics and Lemon Jelly. (Or if you just like Xerxes in the first place.) |
| Fidgital | Druthers Kitsilano Social disease | Adriane remixed this group. “Kitsilano” has strong John Beltran vibes (as well as Underworld’s “Beautiful Burnout” a few years later); I don’t care for the other two songs. |
| Landscape Body Machine | Esoteric Last of the Species | Just go to adrianelake.com at this point, because she remixed this band too. “Esoteric” has some good cinematics; I’m not into the other track. |
| Pellucid | blabber pellmell | Arliss Renwick! They’re both bouncy fun tunes (or at least fun to me – I’m not sure they’d be fun to a typical person.) |
| Soma Sonic | Crazy Moon (feat. A. Weiss) | Listed as Downtempo. See my comment for this artist in the Hip Hop folder for my thoughts on the issue with big categories when you get to bands like this. The A. stands for Andrea. |
| Subyektive Obyekt | Byte Melting Moonslicer | Byte Melting is good but takes awhile to get anywhere; Moonslicer is more interesting to people who are not me. |
World (8 songs)
| Artist | Song(s) | Notes |
| The Bliss | Voglio | Classified as Italian Pop Rap. That’s a new one on me. Well, I say that, but Prisencolinensinainciusol is ol’ rait. |
| Frank Wakefield | Blackberry Blossom | Banjo? |
| Juba | Zulu Seliyaduma Mambo Jesu | Fun vocals! |
| Stefan | Danza Mora | Solo acoustic guitar piece. (Why didn’t the flamenco classical ones come down here and join the real world? Ha it’s a pun.) |
| Tom Aragon | Ceremony [as Tom Aragon/Taressa] Warpath [as Tom Aragon II] | Warpath has a very ’90s flute sound, but the rest of this is all pretty good gothy atmospheres. (Okay, I also like the ’90s flute; it just hasn’t aged well.) |
| Veena Sahasrabuddhe | Tanom Tanom | Mostly female vocals, sitar, and percussion. |
restlessmosaic.com 