The next day, Ajay was like a man possessed. Keeping aside $2,000 for himself, he decided to blow the entire $5,000 on promotions.
Ajay immediately knew he needed a website where he could funnel all the users so that he could not only use the website to promote A Thousand Years but also promote all his songs in the future.
So he first enquired where he could get a domain, and to his delight, domains were actually free. He could register however many he wanted, as long as no one had taken them.
Ajay immediately tried to register all the popular domains he knew from his previous life, but unfortunately, it took too long. He couldn't wait that long, so he put the matter aside for later. Since he had plenty of time to register Google, Amazon, Tesla, and SpaceX, he first registered a domain name for his company, jay.com.
Ajay didn't wait around until the domain name got approved. He immediately started shopping. He needed a server to host the website. Thankfully, parts in this day and age were actually very cheap.
So he got an Intel 66 MHz processor, a Socket 3 motherboard, 16 MB of RAM, a 540 MB hard drive, a 1 MB SVG graphics card, a CD-ROM, a floppy disk, a computer case, a 200 W power supply, and an I/O controller card.
It would have cost him over $2,000 if he had directly bought the pre-built versions from Dell or IBM, but since he assembled everything himself, it only cost him around $1,670.
He then got the peripherals, like the CRT monitor, keyboard, mouse, internet modem that only supported speeds of up to 28.8 kbps, a small UPS, a surge protector, and other miscellaneous things. This set him back $730.
Internet in 1994 was very complicated. Dedicated Ethernet lines didn't exist yet. So he learned about the internet situation and immediately got to work.
He called his landline service provider, Pacific Bell, and requested a separate landline connection.
As for the one he already had, he contacted an internet service provider called Netcom, which had a pretty good reputation around the area, and asked them to set up an unlimited internet access plan.
Thankfully, apart from the $100 he had to pay up front for a second line, the monthly bills were not too high. For both the landlines and the internet service plan, it cost him around $70 per month.
After bringing everything to the apartment, Ajay immediately started coding. Thankfully, in his last life, he was one of those who learned coding from the ground up. He learned C, then he went to HTML and other languages.
So he was quickly able to write the script for a simple HTML website that would be his company's website.
Throughout the process, Vincent was looking at him with his big blue eyes wide open, as if he was seeing Ajay for the first time and as if he was seeing some sort of alien. But Ajay was in a hurry, and he didn't care to explain. Besides, he didn't have a reason to give either.
Thankfully, the guy didn't ask anything, and Ajay acted as if he didn't feel the glaring daggers directed towards him.
By the time he was done writing the code for the website, the domain got approved, and he immediately coupled it together.
With a click of a few buttons, jay studios.com went online.
Once it was online, Ajay immediately started writing down the content. His website was simple. It contained his biography, song information, and lyrics.
So after filling up all the details, he quickly uploaded the snippets of "Thrift Shop" and titled it "The First Song That I Wrote."
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He wanted to upload the entire song to attract more people, but aside from the copyright laws, where he was not allowed to publicise the song, the internet was at a very basic stage. Streaming was not the same. He could only place the song on his computer and let people download it and stream it on their own computers offline. Online streaming was not possible; the only thing possible was streaming a small snippet.
Once he was done uploading the snippet of Thrift Shop, he chose a completely different method to upload his second song, the song for which he needed publicity.
He wrote a C program on the compiler and quickly strung together a few low-quality happy images, one of a bride, one of a girl celebrating her birthday, and another of a woman being pregnant.
Then he took the part of the song that was used in his last life for TikTok, Shorts and Reels, and compressed it with the images to make a GIF.
He reduced the resolution of the images as much as possible, and he was able to make the whole GIF less than 10 KB.
He uploaded this GIF as his second song and put a caption, "A song for every happy occasion," and then under it, it read, "The second song I wrote. Click to play a snippet, going online on the 14th of November."
Ajay would have loved to include a chat feature and other features on the website as well, but internet speeds were the biggest bottleneck. Even if he had a supercomputer at his disposal, the speed wouldn't be any faster.
So he settled for simplicity.
Once he was done preparing the website, he started registering it with major web directories. Thankfully, this didn't prove to be too hard. He was once again made to realise that he was currently in the early stage of the internet, where there were no more than a few thousand websites in the world.
He registered his website with Yahoo Directory, Lycos, WebCrawler, and a few other major web directories.
Then he uploaded small demos to FTP servers, the servers that would usually get picked up by university websites, which gave a lot of coverage, and also uploaded promotional material to bulletin board systems. This was where hobbyists and internet users of the current era downloaded their music, artwork, and software.
He had some other ideas, like creating an email mailing list where he could mail the promotional material for the new song to all the email addresses, but he was still unknown.
Instead, he contacted independent music websites, pages related to music, and college radio stations. He offered interviews, promotional CDs, exclusive demos, artist information, and some press material.
Not everyone of them responded, but some did. He immediately handed over the task of arranging the interviews between Melissa and the college radio stations to Vincent, and he dived into Usenet discussions and joined as many music-related discussion groups as possible.
He started contributing as many meaningful posts as he humanly could, and once in a while plugged his domain in the comments. He had to make sure that he wouldn't come off as a scammer, so his contributions were more than his advertisements.
Once in a while, he would also jump to IRC and spend time in music chat rooms, answering questions, discussing music production, and directing users to his website.
San Francisco
Aaron was a geek who loved technology, so he was one of the first people in his class to get a computer for himself.
After Aaron was done browsing and understanding the latest developments in integrated circuit technology, he licked his lips and straight away went to a bulletin board service website.
This was a hack he discovered: if he downloaded songs from the internet, he didn't have to pay any money for the songs.
He looked around for a while, and he noticed an interesting post.
"Hello everyone, I'm an aspiring songwriter. My first song, "Thrift Shop," went platinum. I'm looking for people to take a look at my demo. This is my website."
Aaron was immediately surprised. A major artist, a platinum songwriting artist, was actually on the internet, and he had actually opened a website?
Although he hadn't heard the song called "Thrift Shop," he still knew what a platinum single was, so he remembered the domain name and went to the domain.
What he saw greatly surprised him.
"How does this look so good?" He couldn't help but be amazed.
Even some of the larger websites he had visited were not so neat and tidy.
Everything on the website felt interactive and unique, and all the element placements in the user interface felt so human and natural.
If Ajay had known that, instead of being attracted to the website by word of mouth, a guy was actually surprised because of the user experience, he wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry.
In the end, however, everything worked out for the better because Aaron, after being thoroughly impressed, quickly spread the word throughout his community, bragging about how he found the website of the future.
In 1994, most of the internet users were geeks like Aaron. As soon as their curiosity was piqued, they began to dive into the website, and after they were surprised and amazed, the traffic continued to increase.