VISIONARY OF ART — AND INVESTING,
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS IN FOR SUCH A BASHING. MUSIC IS GOING TO BECOME LIKE RUNNING WATER. — BOWIE
In 2002, when people were still lugging around wallets full of CDs and a year before Apple Inc. would launch its iTunes music store, David Bowie foretold the future in an interview with The New York Times: “The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it,” he said. “Authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music is going to become like running water or electricity.” He was certainly right about that, as attested by the many people who took to social media to share YouTube clips of their favourite Bowie songs as an expression of sadness at his death from cancer Sunday. But years before Bowie made his prediction, he was launching groundbreaking experiments in making art — and money — in the digital age. The Financial Post’s Claire Brownell offers up some of his lesser-known ventures and innovations.
ONLINE MUSIC EXCLUSIVES
In 1996, Bowie made history by releasing his new song Telling Lies on the Internet — and nowhere else. The move made him the first major artist to send fans who wanted to hear his music to the web instead of the record store. It was a success, with Telling Lies selling more than 300,000 downloads. Bowie was also an early adopter of interactive CDROMs that packaged multimedia material along with music (remember those?). In 1997, he even live-streamed a concert from Boston online.
BOWIE BONDS
Seeing that the future did not look friendly for the wallets of recording artists, Bowie decided to lock in his future earnings. In 1997, he sold the rights to future royalties from some of his biggest hits, including Changes and Space Oddity, for US$55 million. The securitized royalty streams were dubbed “Bowie bonds” and they sparked a financial trend known as esoteric asset-backed securities — basically the rights to future payments from unconventional sources. Examples of other esoteric ABSes include loans to purchase washing machines, racehorse stud rights and the rights to the Peanuts cartoon strip.
BOWIENET
Forget Rogers and Bell: In 1998, one of your options if you were looking for an Internet Service Provider was David Bowie. Bowie launched BowieNet in 1998, which combined features of an ISP, a fan website and a social network. Users got a BowieNet email address, access to an iTunes predecessor offering downloadable music for sale and access to David Bowie fan content. They also got five megabytes of space online, with users encouraged to create their own websites and chat with each other in forums. Bowie saw interacting and collaborating with fans online as an extension of his art in addition to a business venture: “The piece of work is not finished until the audience comes to it and adds their own interpretation,” he told Newsnight in a December 1999 interview.
BOWIEBANC
Bowie extended himself further into the world of financial services in 2000, making a marketing deal with USABancshares.com to lend his image to an online bank called BowieBanc. Customers got debit and credit cards featuring the musician’s face and a discounted subscription to BowieNet. “No. 1, he loves doing cutting-edge stuff; and No. 2, he’s a very smart businessman,” business partner Robert Goodale was quoted as saying at the time.
ULTRASTAR
To facilitate his various online business ventures, Bowie incorporated a tech startup called UltraStar. At the peak of the dotcom bubble of the late ’90s and early ’00s, it was worth US$818 million. The idea was to provide ISP portals similar to BowieNet for fans of celebrities and sports teams, including the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Yankees. The idea never really caught on, but the idea of celebrities and brands using the Internet to market themselves and connect with fans certainly did.