We certainly take music’s relationship with the internet for granted now. Previously, we had to wait until we could take a trip to a local Christian bookstore or music seller to pick up an album on release day. Now, we can buy the album digitally on our computer or phone at midnight of release day from literally anywhere — as long as our phone has a signal or we have internet access.
And back in the late 90’s, record labels were still trying to figure out what to do with online media. At one point, someone at a label (and unfortunately, I can’t really recall which one) told me they couldn’t send us music as often as we needed it because they didn’t believe the internet was an legitimate form of media.
Ha, times have changed, haven’t they?
But the first record label to really take note of JFH was Forefront Records (home to DC Talk, Audio Adrenaline, Rebecca St. James, DeGarmo & Key, Bleach, etc), and we started up a friendship with the label that would last a few years. In the summer of 1998, while I was helping out the label’s street team (called “The Buzz”) at Creation East Festival, the head of the team offered to help us migrate the site to an official dotcom with server space on NetCentral in exchange for JFH helping to do grassroots promotion for DC Talk’s brand new “Supernatural” album. They’d cover the costs to help us get going and give us any server space we needed. It was a dream come true for a broke 18-year-old Christian music enthusiast fresh out of high school… and since we’re all Christians here, it just couldn’t get any better… right?
JFH front page in August, 2004
Life for me has changed drastically since being a 16-year-old kid with a minimal social life who started a very time-intensive website in JFH. I started college in the fall of 1998 and majored in Advertising/Design. And after 5 semesters there, all I knew is that I’d wanted to just work on JFH full-time. I took a part-time job doing web support type work at a local company in 2000, got engaged to my girlfriend in 2001, married in 2003, bought our condominium in 2006, quit that job later that year, and finally took JFH full-time. In 2010, our son Will was born (after a miscarriage the year before), and life changed dramatically yet again. All the while, the music industry was going through its own growth spurts… and then deep dives. Twenty years in, JFH is a part-time project once again and the time I’ve had to spend on it has been cut down drastically from a decade ago. But thanks to the incredible staff of volunteers who help out on a regular basis, JFH prevails. And hopefully it will continue to do so for as long as God allows or wants it to.Aside from stating the obvious that promises that had been made were not kept, I’ll just say that the experience was a life lesson and an unfortunate one. However, the silver lining to the whole mishegas was that it did help us get the site onto Jesusfreakhideout.com officially (and… by 2001 — almost three years later — I was able to fianlly get the ownership rights back to it…).
So, with that said… here’s to whatever the future holds in store next for Jesus Freak Hideout! Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the years!
— John DiBiase (JFH founder / Editor / Writer)