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superterran radio

superterran.com · 2002–2003 · a personal-site jukebox in the Kazaa years

Every self-respecting personal site in 2002 had to do something when you showed up. Mine played music. Tucked into the 2002 and 2003 versions of superterran.com was a “radio” — a folder of Windows Media streams that turned my homepage into a low-bitrate jukebox of whatever was on TRL that week.

The playlist

The radio was just a folder of .wma files, each one a full track, named after the artist. Recovered from the archive, the lineup is a perfect snapshot of 2002–2003 radio:

The audio itself isn’t reproduced here — these are commercial songs, not my own work, so the museum preserves the track list rather than re-hosting the music. The point was never the songs anyway; it was that a 16-year-old’s website auto-played Eminem at you, in glorious 64 kbps Windows Media.

“Slickness” — a playlist from My Shared Folder

The single most period-accurate file in the whole archive might be a four-line Windows Media Player playlist called Slickness.wpl. It’s worth reading in full, because of where the songs live:

<media src="..\..\..\My Shared Folder\Stacie Orrico - Stuck.MP3"/>
<media src="..\..\..\My Shared Folder\03 gettin; jiggy wit it.wma"/>
<media src="..\..\..\My Shared Folder\Kylie Minogue - In Your Eyes.mp3"/>
<media src="C:\My Music\Outkast - Hey Ya.mp3"/>

My Shared Folder. That’s the Kazaa / Morpheus / WinMX folder — the shared directory every file-sharing client of the era dumped its downloads into, half of them mislabeled, all of them at whatever bitrate some stranger had ripped them. Stacie Orrico, Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” Kylie Minogue, Outkast’s “Hey Ya” — a playlist named, with total sincerity, Slickness. The .wpl is just pointers and GUIDs, so it survives intact as a tiny fossil of how we all got our music before iTunes won.

The radio quietly disappeared in the later redesigns, around the time broadband and actual media players made a homepage jukebox feel quaint. But for a couple of years, visiting superterran.com meant getting served a song whether you asked for one or not.