At peak, it was amongst the top ten most visited entertainment websites in Europe, with millions of registered users, and one of the highest profile new-age internet startups.

Post dot-com bubble, PeopleSound was sold to Vitaminic, and the combined entity was listed on the Italian Stock Exchange.

[1][2][3] The platform was built on the premise that technology could help consumers discover music and that an entire new generation of artists needed new channels to be distributed through.

[5][6] The early team included Bruno Heese; Martin Turner, formerly head of CompuServe UK; and Paul Levett.

[1] By Autumn 1999, Schmitt told the BBC that PeopleSound aimed to "start in the UK and then rapidly setting up subsidiaries in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Benelux countries and even Turkey".

[15][16][17] It had sites in English, German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian,[15] and ranked in the top ten most popular entertainment sites and as one of the highest-profile tech startups in the UK; Les Echos named Schmitt "one of the elite figures of the London Net-economy", while ZDNet declared him "one of the UK's better known Web entrepreneurs".

[25] By October 2000, the site represented more than 10,000 unsigned bands and artists, holding the master and recording rights to their music, and had over 1.5 million registered users.

[29] By September 2000, recording company EMI, having just merged with $14 billion Time Warner, announced a wide-ranging partnership with PeopleSound.

[30][31] In October 2000, PeopleSound launched a service for marketers to discover and license music for TV, digital and offline advertising.

[34] The pan-European digital music company, listed on Milan's Nuovo Mercato stock exchange, was interested in PeopleSound, which had nearly sold to Terra Lycos earlier in the year.

[35][36][37][38][39] The deal made the joint entity one of the top three largest music platforms on the web and left PeopleSound shareholders with a 19 per cent stake in Vitaminic, the company being one of few post-bubble exits.

[46][49] PeopleSound operated under a freemium model, under which music on the site was free but artists could opt to sell physical copies.