Dotmusic was an internet music site that existed as a stand alone website from June 1995 to December 2003. Initially intended as the web compliment to the UK music industry trade magazine Music Week, the site was relaunched in December 1998 as a website for music fans.
Dotmusic was originally owned by Miller Freeman, before being sold to BT in 2002. In 2003 the site was sold to Yahoo! and subsequently incorporated into Yahoo's UK based music portal, UK Launch. Whilst some features remain, namely the music news pages (and news archive) plus the weekly chart commentary by James Masterton, the most popular feature of Dotmusic, the community message boards, was closed.
The community spirit lived on in the wake of the forum closure, with the majority of the community moving on to new privately created discussion forums. Notable among these are Moopy, offshooting from the general discussion forum, Chart Refugees, carrying much of the former Chart forum users. Many posters have left or simply been banned from Chart Refugees over the past six months, that aren’t capable of getting ‘in’ with the ‘crowd' MadonnaNation and MJ Refugees, keeping together the bulk of each respective artist forum's members together. However, since their conception in late December 2003, these sites have expanded beyond their original areas, offering other artist forums, as well as specialist genre forums for general news and user-created personal charts. But is still pale in comparison to Cool Clarity, the real place for intelligent conversation and chart knowledge