In the face of all this, the fate of a handful of music blogs largely faded into the background. But for Mr. Hofman and others, the episode has had lasting consequences. After OnSmash was seized, Mr. Hofman started FreeOnSmash.com as a replacement, but its traffic and advertising revenue were a fraction of what he had once had. Even worse, Mr. Hofman said, was the “black cloud” of suspicion that surrounded him in the industry.

“When I went to album release parties,” he said, “people looked at me like they had seen a ghost.” Corporate sponsorship of live events, once an important part of the site’s business, also dried up, he added.

Suing for the return of OnSmash would have been expensive and risky, so Mr. Hofman pursued an “offer in compromise” with the government — submitting a petition for the site’s return, and paying what the government determined to be its appraised value: $7.

In March 2012, Craig Trainor, Mr. Hofman’s lawyer, submitted a 66-page memorandum of law outlining their case. Rather than a rogue site that hurt music labels, Mr. Trainor argued, OnSmash was “an indispensable forum for hip-hop fans, a marketing vehicle for record labels and artists, and a generator of protected speech.” He also noted that Dajaz1.com had been returned to its owner after about a year.

The OnSmash case dragged on for another three and a half years until October, when — with a five-year statute of limitations on the seizure looming — the government notified Mr. Trainor that OnSmash would be returned. Paperwork with his web host took another month or so, Mr. Hofman said, and he finally got the site back in November.

When asked about the return of OnSmash and another site, Torrent-Finder.com, which was seized in the 2010 raid and also returned to its operator this fall, Matthew Bourke, a spokesman for the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that after working with the Justice Department, “it was determined there was not enough evidence to seize the websites.”

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the recording industry association, said he welcomed the return of the sites, as long as they played by the rules. “If the managers of some of these sites now seek to have the domain name returned because they wish to become legitimate operators, that’s a success,” he said. In recent months, the music industry has successfully shut down unlicensed sites like Aurous, Sharebeast and RockDizMusic.