I have sold the beats.com domain name. It is the end of an era. I used to work at an Internet/multimedia development company as an “Internet Specialist/Webmaster” some years ago. It was there where I had the responsibility for registering customers’ domain names, setting up the DNS servers, and web servers, and even doing the HTML to put together pages. The Internet was so much simpler then. I registered two domain names that were dear to me in particular:

madisons.com
and
beats.com

Both were registered for obvious reasons–the latter being my love of hip hop, in particular the beats. It wasn’t even considered an investment to do so at the time–you just found a domain name that suited you and registered it.

And i did. I put up some sites for some friends, and myself, let folk have email accounts on it. It was a bustling little spot.

When I started working with a group, I appropriated the domain for the group (the wax musim). It had a good run. In fact, I’d consider it an early blog, First done with html, then coded from scratch using PHP and postgresql.

beats.com is the playground on which i built my chops on much of my php development, system admin, and especially email admin (it’s extremely interesting to note how many folk will spoof a beats.com domain name as their email address suffix).

I met quite a few people simply by virtue of the domain name. I likely wouldn’t have been running a record label without it.

The beats.com moniker was loved and envied by any hip hopper that I had come in contact with; I definitely wore it with pride–there has been many an article of clothing that has been made, and even sold, that rocked the beats.com name and various wax musim logos.

Time passes, however, and with anything that isn’t a primary focus, interest and direction fades. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all–my heart was never (and still is not ever) set on “making it” in the music industry, so its easier for me (albeit still difficult) to lay down certain aspects of the “music side of me”. The wax musim crew basically split, as a group, and the site was taken down, with no further direction to go.

I had plans on possibly bringing it out as some kind of portal, but if you read on why I won’t ever make money on the Internet, it’s difficult for me to do. And I don’t have the time to do it “well” (in an aesthetically pleasing, relevant manner).

Well, currently the guy who bought it from me has made it a portal of sorts, for now at least–at the very least it isn’t butt ugly, although not relevant (i can only guess it’s strictly for generating revenue and/or reselling it–in many ways i wish i had an idea how to do that) so that’s a slight consolation. It is kind of like losing an old friend, though.

In June it would have been 10 years.

Pour out a little Mikes, then pay some bills. Thanks Yahweh for the blessing.