[HN Gopher] Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in...
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Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
Author : herbertl
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-05-07 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cybercultural.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cybercultural.com)
| zirkonit wrote:
| 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.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Didn't he also bring out a song where the lyrics were
| algorithmically generated?
| philk10 wrote:
| Verbasizer - a sentence randomizer app he designed for
| writing the album's lyrics.
| bch wrote:
| See too Gysin/Burroughs c. 1959.[0]
|
| Bowie would have been ~12yo.
|
| [0] https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-
| techniques...
| 508LoopDetected wrote:
| Apt reference to Burroughs, as he and Bowie ended up
| meeting in the early/mid '70s, and Bowie employed the
| cut-up technique somewhat often on his albums afterwards
| (starting with Diamond Dogs, if I'm not mistaken). So the
| Verbasizer was essentially Bowie's attempt to modernize a
| creative process he was already very fond of.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I remember ripping songs in AudioMaster 2 on the Amiga with a
| sound digitizer, and writing them to floppy as a playable
| stream. You could boot the A500 with the disk and play back the
| digitized song. I think that was the point that it dawned on me
| where music was headed but not the form it would take. This was
| around 1990.
| hluska wrote:
| Or the CD-ROM where you could edit your own video for Jump They
| Say?? Crazy times....
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| Boy, but it sure took the RIAA *years* to figure out that suing
| fans (aka "customers") wasn't the greatest idea...
|
| <shaking my head sadly>
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yeah, now they use Spotify to rip off their artists _and_ their
| customers even harder.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| To be fair it is _incredibly hard_ to think clearly with the
| haze of booze and cocaine that fuels the music industry.
| mmooss wrote:
| How was it not a great idea for the RIAA? I understand how many
| fans / customers didn't like it, but I think people kept buying
| the music and the RIAA's terms and definitions like 'piracy'
| became mainstream (I think that was from the RIAA?).
| pessimizer wrote:
| It was an absolutely successful strategy for them. It was
| traditional terrorism: they went after a few extremely
| sympathetic, small-time victims to show that they definitely
| wouldn't have any problem going after you. It worked, and was
| reasonably cheap.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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).
|
| 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.
|
| 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).
| Sleaker wrote:
| Aux out of pc into your home audio system did the trick. CDs
| were getting soooo cheap back then you could just burn mixes
| and cd players started to put in direct mp3 compatibility
| around then. I grew up a geek though, so this probably just
| came easier to me back then, but the high quality options
| haven't changed much in the last 20 years as far as audio is
| concerned. Just the proliferation of SoC devices has eased the
| playback access.
| dhosek wrote:
| The thing is that the PC and the stereo were often in
| different rooms. That was the case for me where my stereo
| system was in the living room and the computer was in the
| second bedroom of my apartment. Remember that home
| networking, wifi and "spare" computers were also not really a
| thing in 1999 or before either.
| Sleaker wrote:
| I remember getting 25 foot cables, but I know I'm
| definitely in the minority, my dad worked as a telephone
| installer, and loved setting up audio systems so I had a
| bit extra access to the cabling stuff.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 1999 intersected with CD-R drives that were suddenly cost
| effective so you could make your own music CDs for a nominal
| price. Especially as CD players were now the medium everybody
| wanted.
| dhosek wrote:
| Oh man, I just remembered the first generation of CD-R drives
| when blank media was around $500 per disk.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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. ;)
|
| 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.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Still remember working for a wireless company fixing phones as a
| repair tech. One of our steady clients was Prince's studio Flyte
| Time. Terry Lewis would often come in and I'd loved talking to
| him about music. One evening before I was closing up, he dropped
| in with Prince's phone that needed a fast repair.
|
| 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'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'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,
| "Listen to me man, the future of music is singles. You'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."
|
| What happened three years later? Apple created iTunes. How did
| iTunes sell its music? Singles.
|
| Prince was so far ahead of his time, but he needed technology to
| catch up to his philosophy.
| cess11 wrote:
| Looking at Bandcamp and the YouTube channel Black Metal
| Promotion and some similar outlets it seems to me that albums
| are still very much a thing.
|
| For the big pop musicians singles have been very important long
| before the Internet. For the punk and hardcore scenes too, if
| you play fast and hard you'll easily cram ten songs onto a
| vinyl single and if you play a little slower but still hard you
| still put out a few tracks for cheap.
|
| In the market for mass produced, mass advertised music, more
| entertainment than art, singles are surely where it's at.
| Earworms designed to be hits, quick to sell a lot and quickly
| replaced, that kind of thing. I'm not sure if this was the
| business Prince was in, but if he was, singles made sense. From
| your description it doesn't seem like he was mainly after the
| people that regularly put on a 30-60 minute work and listen
| closely without interruptions.
|
| Back in 2002 or so transfering an album over the Internet was
| also a rather cumbersome affair. Pulling that much over a
| nervous 56k modem took a while, so sending one track and
| charging money for it likely made sense from a technical
| perspective as well. I never participated in something like
| that, though, I stole bandwidth and used it for piracy, and
| swapped home burnt CD:s.
| lowercased wrote:
| I seem to recall Lennon's "Instant Karma" phase, where he
| wanted to just _get stuff out_. Had a song idea, recorded,
| mixed, shipped out to pressing and was for sale in stores
| within 10 days.
|
| I suspect a lot of artists over the years have just itched to
| get _something_ out _today_ , but yeah... without the tech, it
| was just impossible.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| James Brown had that vertical integration once he hit his
| stride in the 1960's.
|
| It wasn't uncommon for him to take the band in for a late
| night studio session (after a 3 hr show). The song would be
| recorded and mixed on the fly. Then a copy would be sent to
| his vinyl pressing plant, which could turn the physical
| copies around in a day. At the same time, the radio stations
| he owned in the Augusta GA, area would start playing the
| latest cut. Just in time for it to hit stores and be
| available for purchase.
| bitwize wrote:
| Taylor Swift has demonstrated her genius as a businesswoman
| within the industry by simply re-recording her back catalogue
| as "Taylor's Versions" which the record company had no rights
| to -- also a badass example of a woman taking back control of
| her creative output from an industry dedicated to exploiting
| the likes of her. (Talk to a female musician if you know one.
| Women have few options but to let themselves be exploited,
| sexually and otherwise, if they want to progress in the
| industry.)
|
| Prince could have done the same, but AFAICT he never did.
| Wonder why? Did he figure the rereleases wouldn't sell?
|
| "Weird Al" Yankovic was one of the first major artists to
| switch from an album-based format to just releasing singles as
| they were recorded. Ironic, because Al was always taking good-
| natured jabs at Prince for not permitting him to parody any of
| his music. ("Word Crimes" having one example of such).
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| > Women have few options but to let themselves be exploited,
| sexually and otherwise, if they want to progress in the
| industry
|
| Weinstein and JayZ taught us that plenty of men have the same
| problem...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| In the late 90s it was still very hard to be seen and heard.
| The labels still controlled the pipeline to an extent which
| isn't possible now.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Princes problem was different than Swifts. Prince had a
| recording contract where the company could decide what to
| release of his work and they released less than Prince
| wanted.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Prince could have done the same, but AFAICT he never did.
| Wonder why?
|
| He might not have had the same rights to the music,
| publishing, etc. that Swift has. Also, his music relied quite
| a bit on production (not an insult; it's just the way he made
| music); maybe he felt he couldn't reproduce the originals or
| didn't want versions other than the ones he believed in.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The UK band Squeeze the the same thing, 13 years before
| Taylor did.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/oct/25/sque.
| ..
| Sleaker wrote:
| But wasn't this already what the dance/edm scene was already
| doing? I don't think it's particularly ahead of it's time.
|
| Edit: or more specifically the entire vinyl album history was
| built on EP/SP releases no?
|
| This seems more like a CD/90s back step, and the idea was to
| just go back to older release styles.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The music industry in the 90s was so dead-set on albums because
| albums were their cash cow. You see, when CDs came out, the
| industry realized it was the perfect gimmick to sell you your
| whole music collection all over again, now in crystal-clear
| digital audio. So much so that new industry labeling standards
| had to be made just to distinguish between re-releases and new
| all-digital recordings[0].
|
| Problem is, you can only sell people better versions of the
| same White Album before they have perfect copies of the master
| tapes, after which anything higher quality is just snake oil.
| They didn't want the boom to end, so they pushed hard for all
| their artists to release albums, even if singles made more
| sense for them. The music industry didn't have a glut of good
| songs that needed to get packed onto albums for efficiency.
| They were larding up discs with cheaply-produced filler songs
| to justify charging album prices for a single.
|
| Also, fun fact: the original plan for CD singles was to package
| them on smaller discs; Sony even made a portable CD player
| sized specifically for them. That would have further reduced
| the distribution and production costs of singles, as they'd
| take up less shelf space and use less polycarbonate.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| > the original plan for CD singles was to package them on
| smaller discs
|
| It wasn't just a plan. CD (Maxi) Singles were released in
| European markets in the 80s.[0]
|
| [0]https://www.discogs.com/release/126156-Madonna-Like-A-
| Prayer...
| quesera wrote:
| We had them in the US too.
|
| Tray-based CD players had a separate, smaller, indent of
| about 2.5" (6.35cm :) diameter which would accept them.
| weinzierl wrote:
| There were even business card sized and shaped ones. I
| remember an article in a computer magazine which warned
| against using them in the brand new generation of quad
| speed drives because the unbalanced mass would ruin your
| expensive CD-ROM drive.
|
| https://encrypted-
| tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrOMTr...
| toast0 wrote:
| a) so much for the metric system :P
|
| b) How does that have a 12 inch extended remix and a 12
| inch club mix if it's only a 3 inch CD? Magic!
|
| c) I love how the packaging makes the small cute cd single
| big again. Kind of like the longboxes for full length CDs,
| before jewel cases dominated.
| hluska wrote:
| Being an electronic music fan in the Canadian prairies in
| the 1990s made for some really bizarre sentences. You
| could drive 250 kilometres to pick up the new Stickman 12
| inch. Stickman was a house label out of Toronto.
|
| Or you would pay an obscene amount of money for a 12 inch
| from Germany because you really wanted the 7 inch remix
| on the B side.
| fallinditch wrote:
| Great to find the A Guy Called Gerald remix on this Bowie EP, I
| didn't know Bowie had gone through a drum and bass phase.
|
| I think Bowie was also the first artist to sell his back catalog
| to an investment vehicle.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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 "Head
| First" 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.
|
| https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/06/15/Aerosmith-Head-First...
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/go-aerosmith-how-head-first-...
|
| https://ultimateclassicrock.com/aerosmith-head-first-music-d...
| criddell wrote:
| Billy Idol was pretty early as well. He was on The Well in the
| early 90's.
|
| https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/04/13/the-internet-is-punk-ro...
| danieldk wrote:
| 1994, so late :-)! Frank Zappa proposed something akin to the
| iTunes store and streaming in 1983:
|
| https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/frank-zappa-invented-...
|
| _We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and
| store THE BEST of every record company 's difficult-to-move
| Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central
| processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable
| TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances,
| with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1
| (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or
| ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a
| rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip
| is about $12)._
|
| [...]
|
| _The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more
| Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard
| for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape. Providing
| material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually
| diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would
| be available any time day or night._
|
| The only thing he was missing were hackers, mega-hackers even:
|
| _We require a LARGE quantity of money and the services of a
| team of mega-hackers to write the software for this system.
| Most of the hardware devices are, even as you read this,
| available as off-the-shelf items, just waiting to be plugged
| into each other so they can put an end to "THE RECORD BUSINESS"
| as we now know it._
| pimlottc wrote:
| Proposals are great, but this is HN, credit goes to those who
| ship!
| hluska wrote:
| This article seems like it's part of a series. I hope it goes
| into Robert Goodale and BowieNet - I think that's the most
| interesting part of David Bowie's involvement with the
| internet.
|
| The whole story is kind of bizarre, but in 1998, Robert Goodale
| helped launch BowieNet, which was part ISP, part social network
| and a fan club.
|
| I can't find the article I'm looking for about BowieNet but
| this one is quite good too:
|
| https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/563779/when-david-bowie-...
| Animats wrote:
| At the point the article should be getting to the good part, it
| says:
|
| _" 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"._
| bitwize wrote:
| 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: "We are investigating the use of MPEG Layer III
| compression for music piracy." 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.
|
| 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.)
| mmooss wrote:
| > The trouble ...
|
| How was and is it trouble for the music industry? They've done
| very well in the Internet era.
| bdcravens wrote:
| In 1997 or 1998, I had a 486, and to play an MP3 (which of course
| took hours to download), I'd have to exit out of Windows into DOS
| and do literally NOTHING else but play the command line mp3
| playback app I found.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| In 1997 or 1998, I had a 486 and to play an MP3 (which of
| course took many minutes to download), I'd just type "xmms
| _filename_ " at my zsh prompt running inside Red Hat. While it
| was playing, I'd carry on working in Emacs or a browser or
| both.
| neilv wrote:
| > _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"?_
|
| We play a similar game today, with social media managers.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Larry Rosen_
|
| Wonder if he was related to Hilary Rosen[0]. She was ... _not
| popular_ ... during the "Napster Bad" period.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Rosen
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