It was the last of the three recordings the band made on a contract with Castle between being dropped by EMI Records in 1995 and eventually becoming independent in the 2000s. Continuing Marillion's decline in mainstream success, it became the first album to fail to reach UK Top 40, peaking at number 53 and staying in the charts for just one week.[3] It was also the first album from which no singles were released officially. However, "Deserve" was used as a promo single, and "Rich" served as a radio single in Brazil.
Recorded at The Racket Club between December 1998 and August 1999, marillion.com was self-produced with additional production from Steven Wilson on five out of nine tracks. The tracks "Tumble Down the Years" and "Interior Lulu" were first recorded and mixed during the recording sessions for Radiation (1998), but it was decided not to include them on that album as the band thought the songs were incomplete, and re-recorded them to this album.[4]
The track "House" features a laid-back dub influence and had the working titles "The Massive Attack Song" and "This House Aches".[5] "House" was about the disintegration of Steve Hogarth's marriage; he said, "The house seemed to somehow ooze the pain we were in, even when nobody was there. There wasn’t a level to which I could turn up the hi-fi that drowned out the silence that was still there."[6]
The title of the album is a reference to Marillion's then-new approach in using the Internet to communicate with their fans and in particular to ensure the financing of projects that would later become known as "crowdfunding". In 1997, fans had funded a North American tour, which the Red Ant label had been unable to support, by means of an Internet campaign,[7] and the next album, Anoraknophobia, would be completely financed by pre-orders, making the band independent from record company support, except for distribution.[8] The line "Thank God for the Internet" from the track "Interior Lulu" (although used ironically in the original context) can also be read as an allusion to Marillion's internet activities, and was in fact used as a slogan later.
While preparing the album, the band's management invited fans to send them passport photographs and 732 of these were then used to make up the artwork for the slipcase. As the eleventh studio album, the number 11 can be seen in the "LL" of the name "marillion" on the cover. The front cover was taken at the end of Long Acre and the centrepiece outside the Palace Theatre at the end of Charing Cross Road.[9]
In 2012, the independent label Madfish, a division of Snapper Music, re-released marillion.com as a deluxe edition[nb 2] packaged in a 36-page digibook format with an additional artwork designed by Carl Glover,[10] and as a limited double 180gm heavyweight vinyl edition[nb 3] featuring a slightly modified track listing.[11]
