MySpace changed how underground bands found fans, booked shows and built scenes. The artists that survived learned a lesson musicians still need: platforms disappear, but relationships can travel.

Before streaming metadata, a bad MP3 filename could become music history. Retard-O-Bot’s “Facade” became “Pimpz and Basketballz,” while other mislabeled tracks were credited to Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails and Weird Al.

Streaming made music easier to hear than ever. Now fans are hunting physical media, rare CDs, vinyl and old merch while rebuilding the culture around the songs.

MySpace lost millions of songs from the era when underground bands built entire worlds online. Twenty years later, younger fans are digging through broken pages, old CDs and forgotten hard drives to piece some of it back together.

In the 2000s, some of the most interesting underground bands had a simple problem: nobody knew what shelf to put them on.

How Hot Topic became an unlikely discovery and distribution network for underground music in the 2000s, including Tampa electropunk band Retard-O-Bot.

Retard-O-Bot came out of Tampa at the turn of the millennium, when building an audience still meant putting bodies in a van, records in a box and thousands of miles on the odometer. If you wanted people in another city to know your band in the early 2000s, the most reliable method was to go there.