1999
Europop
· Eiffel 65 ·
The debut. Blue. Move Your Body. Too Much of Heaven. Your Clown. The album that turned an anonymous Turin studio into a global pop act. Multi-platinum across Europe.
The Bliss Corporation forum ran for six years and pulled in regulars from more than thirty countries. The music was Eiffel 65, Gabry Ponte, Maury Lobina, and the whole adjacent catalog of Italo-dance most American radio missed. Below: the records, the room, the people, and the small subgroups that formed inside it.
Bliss Corporation was an Italian record label founded in Turin in 1992 by three childhood friends: Gabry Ponte, Maurizio "Maury" Lobina, and Massimo Gabutti. Through the mid-1990s the label produced anonymous Italo-dance singles under dozens of one-off project names (Bloom 06, Da Blitz, Karma) and built a steady catalog of European club hits that rarely made it across the Atlantic.
The turning point came in 1998, when Gabry, Maury, and a new singer named Jeffrey Jey (born Gianfranco Randone) recorded a track called "Blue (Da Ba Dee)." It was released in Italy in late 1998 and spread to the rest of Europe through 1999. By the time it reached the US in 2000, it was a generational song. The trio had a name, Eiffel 65, and Bliss had a global act. Their debut album Europop went multi-platinum across Europe. Singles like "Move Your Body," "Too Much of Heaven," and "My Console" followed.
Through the early 2000s, the label kept expanding. Gabry Ponte launched a solo career as a DJ and producer with tracks like "Time to Rock," "Geordie," and the novelty crossover "Doctor Jekyll & Mister DJ" with Little Tony. He remixed nearly every track in the BlissCo back-catalog and became one of Italy's best-known dance producers. Maurizio Lobina continued composing inside Eiffel 65 and as a session keyboardist. Jeffrey Jey contributed vocals across the wider Bliss Corporation roster.
A second Eiffel 65 album, Contact!, came out in 2001. A third, self-titled and Italian-language, in 2003. In 2005 Gabry Ponte left the group to focus on his solo work. By 2006 the active version of the band had effectively dissolved. (Eiffel 65 reunited in 2010 with a different lineup.) Bliss Corporation continued as a label, but the cultural moment of the early 2000s, the one this site is about, was over.
If you were on BlissCo in those years, at least one of these was almost certainly in your CD player, on your MP3 player, or playing through your tinny webradio at school. They're the soundtrack the forum was built around.
The debut. Blue. Move Your Body. Too Much of Heaven. Your Clown. The album that turned an anonymous Turin studio into a global pop act. Multi-platinum across Europe.
The second album. Lighter dance-pop. Lucky (In My Life), 80s Stars, One Goal, Back in Time. Less ubiquitous, more rewarding once you live in it.
The Italian-language pivot. Quelli Che Non Hanno Età. Voglia Di Dance All Night. Cosa Resterà (In A Song). The album the forum lived inside, in real time.
Time to Rock. Geordie. The People's Choice. The crossover into solo dance-floor producer. The TLB crew on the forum loved this one.
The novelty hit that lived on European dance radio through 2005-2006. With Little Tony. Forum users posted the music video for months.
The pre-Eiffel 65 catalog. Anonymous Italo-house projects the same producers built before Blue. The deep-cut taste markers older forum regulars used to flag each other.
The BlissCo Forum lived at blisscoforum.com, a vBulletin-style board run by the label as the official-ish English-language fan community. Italian was the language of the back-end, but the front-of-house operated in English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and (unofficially) Hungarian, Russian, and Polish. Members registered with handles anyone who was on the internet in 2003 will recognize on sight. eiffel65_rox. Dj Cear. Cinelze. Vj81487. Queen of Lullaby.
The forum had a producer subsection where members uploaded their own tracks and others rated them. This was where Vanessa, a sixteen-year-old composer from Virginia who went by Vj81487 and recorded as VTM, uploaded her early demos. It was also where she met Todd, who would become one of her closest friends.
There were photo threads. Daily song recommendations. A "what are you listening to" thread that ran what felt like forever. An off-topic board where most of the actual friendship-making happened. And, over six years live, somewhere north of 3,500 registered users from more than 30 countries, with a core of maybe 100-200 daily regulars at peak.
The forum went dark around 2008. The label restructured. The ownership of blisscoforum.com lapsed. The Wayback Machine has scattered captures from 2004-2007 but most of the social fabric is gone. This site exists partly to preserve what we can reconstruct from those scattered captures, and partly to put the people who were there back in the same room.
A single thread that ran for years. Every post answered the previous question and asked a new one. Hundreds of pages.
Tag-style thread. Ran continuously for more than three years. Brooke threw flowers; Cear threw paper airplanes; Vj81487 threw a thank-you card.
Periodic threads where members shared selfies. Multiple parts as old ones filled up. The most-replied threads on the board.
Oct 2004 thread where members named their closest forum friends. Vanessa's answer is how we know who her crew really was.
Daily Eurodance recommendation. A few hundred consecutive days of post-2000s Italian and German trance and Italo singles.
The forum had a built-in demo submission and voting system. Vanessa uploaded her VTM demos here through 2007.
Maurizio Lobina superfan club. Mostly female teens. Sandra and Brooke ran it together. They'd sign posts ~Sandra ~Brooke (me)~.
Inside-joke crew of older male regulars. Blue Edge, Ciberboy, ItaloDancer, JJ, Massi, Mikko, Stay-Depeched.
Todd's own small forum, born off BlissCo and parallel to it. Members chatted nightly. Vanessa was one of the first to join.
Brooke (Cranbourne North), Cear (Perth), Shelley (Victoria), SoftScarlett (Aus). Held a corner of the off-topic.
Queen of Lullaby (Spain), EdUaRdO65 (Chile), ale666 (Bolivia), carles_maulet (Catalonia). Held the Spanish posts going.
Cinelze, balage020, and a few more. Friendliest demo-listeners on the site. Some wrote for the affiliated danceria.com magazine.
The official languages were Italian, English, Spanish, French, German, and Dutch. The unofficial languages were Hungarian, Russian, Polish, and a steady drip of mixed-tongue private messages between the polyglots. The most active region by post volume was Italy. The most active region by handles per capita was probably Hungary.
No surnames on the public site. No member photos. No biographical detail anyone didn't already share publicly on the original forum. If your handle is here and you'd like it gone, write in — down the same day, no questions, no proof needed.
Not connected to Bliss Corporation, Eiffel 65, Gabry Ponte, Maurizio Lobina, Jeffrey Jey, or any current artist or label. All commentary is original. Names of artists and people appear in historical context only.
Drop your old handle. Tell us which records you played to death. Send the demo you uploaded in 2005 and forgot about. We're rebuilding the soft tissue of the forum a memory at a time.