Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996

Still remember working for a wireless company fixing phones as a repair tech. One of our steady clients was Prince&#x27;s studio Flyte Time. Terry Lewis would often come in and I&#x27;d loved talking to him about music. One evening before I was closing up, he dropped in with Prince&#x27;s phone that needed a fast repair.<p>I finally asked him what the deal with Prince and his music was. The Warner Brothers kerfuffle, and all the drama around him wanting to own all his music. I&#x27;ll never forget Jimmy telling me in late 1998 or 99 how Prince was about to change the music industry. He said that Prince wanted to put out music when HE felt like. If he creates one or two songs he loves, he doesn&#x27;t want to feel like he has to put together another 8-9 songs in an album, he wants to release those two and let the fans get them, instead of waiting for an ENTIRE ALBUM of music he would have to create. Jimmy looked at me with a seriousness when he said, &quot;Listen to me man, the future of music is singles. You&#x27;ll see. Prince is going to push the entire music industry to start selling nothing but singles. This internet stuff? Its built for singles, not albums.&quot;<p>What happened three years later? Apple created iTunes. How did iTunes sell its music? Singles.<p>Prince was so far ahead of his time, but he needed technology to catch up to his philosophy.

1999 was probably the year that online distribution really took off with Napster catching the labels unprepared (Apple’s iTunes Music Store did a lot to prove to the labels that people would actually pay for music downloads, although it would be years before legal DRM-free downloads became a reality).<p>I had a handful of downloaded music files that I acquired in 1998–9, but I rarely listened to them because other than burning a CD from them, there wasn’t a good way to listen to them on my main music system and my computer speakers were relatively crappy—I had a CD boombox in my home office that I used to listen to music when I was at my computer rather than popping a CD into the computer to play music. I suspect most people today have little idea how crappy the options were for listening to digital music files pre-iPod which really did a lot to revolutionize things.<p>I was at my 35-year college reunion this past weekend and the thing I found most eerie was the fact that the campus was so quiet. Back in my day, there would be a significant stereo system in every dorm room (or almost every dorm room) and music would be played at levels that could be heard outside the dorms (the dorm I lived in was notorious as being a loud music dorm and the residents of one suite had purchased the old enormous speakers that had been used for campus parties and positioned them outside their room to be able to provide music to the dorm as a whole. In a way this sort of thing acted like a kind of low-range radio for sharing music with others—I think that’s a big part of how many of my classmates got into Marillion (I was responsible for introducing folks to Toyah Wilcox as well as messing with their minds when I’d play Peter Gabriel in German or Sting in Spanish).

Sounds like Bowie was really a late-comer to online music distribution, by a few years at least.. I think the first mover award goes to Aerosmith for releasing and distributing &quot;Head First&quot; online-only in 1994. No one was using MP3 yet, so it was WAV encoded using a proprietary compression codec that was a separate download. The WWW had only just barely been invented and only a few physics nerds in Switzerland were using it, so it was released on Compuserve only. I signed up for a trial account to download the song. I only had a 9600 baud modem at the time and recall waiting overnight for the download.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upi.com&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;1994&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;Aerosmith-Head-First-onto-CompuServe&#x2F;5575771652800&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upi.com&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;1994&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;Aerosmith-Head-First...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;go-aerosmith-how-head-first-became-the-first-song-available-for-digital-download-20-years-ago-today&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;go-aerosmith-how-head-first-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ultimateclassicrock.com&#x2F;aerosmith-head-first-music-download&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ultimateclassicrock.com&#x2F;aerosmith-head-first-music-d...</a>

David Bowie was always the pioneer with regards to the Internet. Launched his own ISP in 1998, probably the first mainstream musician with a website (in 1994!), first concert streamed in 1997, etc. etc.

<i>&gt; Larry Rosen</i><p>Wonder if he was related to Hilary Rosen[0]. She was ... <i>not popular</i> ... during the &quot;Napster Bad&quot; period.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hilary_Rosen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hilary_Rosen</a>

In 1997 or 1998, I had a 486, and to play an MP3 (which of course took hours to download), I&#x27;d have to exit out of Windows into DOS and do literally NOTHING else but play the command line mp3 playback app I found.

One reason for the existence of albums were distribution costs: it was cheaper to produce, ship and store 10 songs on a single disc than shipping 10 separate discs.

&gt; <i>As part of the launch day activities, Bowie took part in an online chat hosted on CompuServe. The gimmick was that there were “three David Bowie’s” in the chat room — with one being the real Bowie. The audience asked a bunch of questions, and each online Bowie would reply anonymously. Could the internet users tell which two were “telling lies”?</i><p>We play a similar game today, with social media managers.

At the point the article should be getting to the good part, it says:<p><i>&quot;However, the e-commerce part of the equation would take another year to implement (which we will cover in an upcoming post). ... Buy the book&quot;.</i>

Great to find the A Guy Called Gerald remix on this Bowie EP, I didn&#x27;t know Bowie had gone through a drum and bass phase.<p>I think Bowie was also the first artist to sell his back catalog to an investment vehicle.

The trouble is that piracy can run halfway around the world while the legitimate distribution networks are just getting their shoes on. Around that same time frame -- summer of 1996 -- is when I saw an item on the Damaged Cybernetics (remember them?) web site that read: &quot;We are investigating the use of MPEG Layer III compression for music piracy.&quot; Those investigations bore major fruit, because by the tine Napster emerged, distribution networks of MP3s (and sometimes other formats like VQF) on IRC channels modelled after warez swapping channels were well entrenched. Napster started off as a search engine for material on such channels.<p>Pirates thus shaped the early years of music distribution and exert significant influence today. Consider for example, the fact that people bristled so much at DRM on music that Apple was forced to remove it from iTunes purchases, whereas DRM is normal and even expected for digitally distributed movies and books. (I was there for the early ebook scene too; readers celebrated DRM as it allowed their favorite authors to be compensated and helped prevent them from being scared off the platform entirely.)

Boy, but it sure took the RIAA •years• to figure out that suing fans (aka “customers”) wasn’t the greatest idea…<p>&lt;shaking my head sadly&gt;

In 1996, I started an online service for musicians which spanned continents, and gave a very small, elite group of us, a servicable means of distributing our .txt and .zip (and .AIF .. .mp3! oh my!) files around the world in a way we could, as a community, kind of pool together, see what happened on a friday, and listen to a bunch of weird and often wonderful new music, fresh from the grill so to speak.<p>This small community grew, and evolved, and turned into a real-time, in-person scene, with meet-ups across the globe. Members came and went, some tragically, some not much more than a fleeting hello and goodbye, but along the way some very interesting, truly underground music came about.<p>Anyway, Bowie was prescient at that time, and if we had his details we would have loved for him to know, that a couple of real cowboys got together with some hippies and aliens and lovers, and rocked out a couple times. We even did some Bowie covers, of course. ;)<p>The site is still out there, in archive.org, but I dare not reveal its nature, for the sake of the legends that will be be spawned from the secret treats that remain, buried, deep within.