(Editor's Note: The "Sunday Morning" essay is an opinion piece and does not reflect the views of SonicNet Inc. or its affiliated companies.)

Editorial Director Michael Goldberg writes:

Five years ago — before dot-com mania, before the founding of RealNetworks and MP3.com, long before MTV and Rolling Stone and Spin launched websites — I founded the first editorially driven music website.

I called it Addicted To Noise.

Within the first year or so, with a small crew of twenty-something techies and a mostly still-in-college editorial staff, we offered downloadable music, daily music news, album reviews with sound samples, Internet radio shows, original video clips of Veruca Salt and Everclear performing, and loads more.

I believe we streamed the first major-label album, when, on the day of release, we offered an entire Neil Young LP.

And, of course, I dreamed of a world where all music was available online. Where one could buy the most obscure and out-of-print blues album and download it. And have it. Right then and there. We imagined Internet radio stations and video channels.

Though my goal was always to serve music lovers rather than to seek acclaim, Newsweek went so far as to dub me a Net visionary.

Five years. That's a long time in the real world. But in Internet time, that's like 50 years.

Addicted To Noise was — and is — more than just a music website. It's an attitude, a feeling, a vibe. It's about point of view. ATN was never for everyone. It has always been for those who care about cool music. And, of course, what's cool changes, so ATN has always been about change.

What ultimately arrived on the Internet on Dec. 1, 1994, began nearly three years earlier, when I first began thinking about the possibility of an interactive, multimedia music magazine.

At the time — 1990 — such things as an archive of album reviews and artist features with sound samples didn't exist. For practical purposes, the Web didn't exist, either — it would be nearly three years before the first Web browser, Mosaic, hit the Net.

I thought my idea was a good one that would find immediate acceptance. I was wrong.

I spent nearly a year trying to convince a major entertainment corporation to fund an Internet music site. That was a very nerve-racking year. My worst fear was that some established company, a Rolling Stone or an MTV, would launch a website before I did, and my site wouldn't get any attention.

Finally, after a full year of beating my head against the wall — of concept revisions and budgets and other ridiculousness — I decided to forget about corporate funding.

And thus, with $5,000 in the bank, I launched Addicted To Noise.

There were many sleepless nights. In the early days, staff would pass out at their workstations. I would crash on the floor of a rented office in Santa Cruz, where production took place for much of the first two-and-a-half years. It was classic start-up stuff.

When I first started calling record companies and artist-manager friends to tell them about this new kind of music magazine I had started, they thought I was crazy. None of them had Internet access. Few of them had even heard of the Internet.

But ATN was the shot heard 'round the world. Within a month, we were being accessed from 50 countries. Radio stations all over the world were using our daily news.

During the past five years, we have interviewed, recorded, videotaped or just hung with artists ranging from R.E.M. and The Artist to Sleater-Kinney, from Rage Against the Machine to Prodigy, from the Smashing Pumpkins to Alanis Morissette, from Neil Young to Le Tigre. Both in ATN and at SonicNet, where we moved the daily news and albums reviews, we have documented the modern music scene, on a daily basis.

Recently, we [MTVi, which now owns SonicNet and ATN] threw a huge party in L.A. Snoop Dogg was one of the featured performers. Hundreds packed the party site. As I stood watching the guests arrive, I heard a young actor say to his friend as he gazed at the models and industry honchos streaming by, "It's a dot-com world now. This is really where it's at."

But of course.