https://www.gwsmedia.com/articles/how-internet-system-requirements-have-changed
two of the artists i remember from then were cleanhead phil speat and seka. more popular with the people running their platform inlcuded electronic music from the baldwin brothers.
it wasn't just using dial up to post music that made mp3s more attractive than lossless audio formats. storage space was also a concern.
prices for bandwidth and storage did drop, but started high. to give some perspective i consider that floppy disks were still normal in the 2000s.
unlike cnet's site, soundclick is still around and have kept some of my music.
recently i've been posting mp3s to this and my other blogspot page (that link may not be effective after a few more posts), and to tumblr and newgrounds. my goal was to make the music freely available. i didn't start selling my music or allowing myself the possibility of being compensated for it until halloween of 2012.
directly above this, was the image i posted over on bandcamp as a header. soon afterward i started posting as nonfer instead of as vodkaseven or v7. by the way the first track i posted to bandcamp was faint and then linked to that through the now defunct G+. at some point i deleted it from there but left it on my first soundcloud page. much later google discontinued G+.