‘The internet is an alien life form’: how David Bowie created a market for digital music
It is far from his best album, and not even his best album of the 1990s, but Hours... is David Bowie’s most significant album that decade. Not because of the music, however, but how it was released: the first album by a major artist on a major label to emerge as a download before it arrived physically.
Writing about the album in August 1999 ahead of its September release, Rolling Stone called Hours… a “cybercoup”: a continuation of Bowie’s fascination with releasing music online, which he started with the Telling Lies single in 1996. He had also enthusiastically embraced webcasting and created his own internet service provider with BowieNet in 1998. “I couldn’t be more pleased to have the opportunity of moving the music industry closer to the process of making digital downloads available as the norm and not the exception,” is how Bowie explained the Hours… release at the time. “We are all aware that broadband opportunities are not yet available to the overwhelming majority of people, and therefore expect the success of this experiment to be measured in hundreds and not thousands of downloads. However, just as colour television broadcasts and film content on home video tapes were required first steps to cause their industries to expand consumer use, I am hopeful that this small step will lead to larger leaps by myself and others ultimately giving consumers greater choices and easier access to the music they enjoy.”
In early 1998, Virgin Records/EMI had made Massive Attack’s Mezzanine available for streaming in full online at the same time as its physical release, albeit previewing it track-by-track over several weeks. At the time, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) cautioned against this, suggesting that streaming experiments could increase the possibility of albums being pirated by tech-savvy individuals and burned to CD. This did not stop other major labels or their acts from occasionally experimenting. Both Def Leppard and Red Hot Chili Peppers made their latest albums, respectively Euphoria and Californication, available to stream in full on 4 June 1999, four days before the records would be in the shops. “Getting airplay is getting airplay, you just have to define air,” said Bob Merlis of Warner Bros, the Chili Peppers’ label. “We felt good about this since it was not downloadable.”
But the Bowie album release was designed to be a significant step forward. In 1999, he was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for BBC Newsnight and talked about his career, his art and, most invigoratingly for him, the internet. The 16-minute interview is still available on the BBC website and is frequently shared, especially since Bowie’s death in January 2016, as evidence of his startling prescience with regard to the impact the internet would have on art, politics and society. “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg,” he told a wearily cynical Paxman. “I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” Paxman, in his arch way, suggested it was just “a tool”, which saw Bowie spring into action. “No, it’s not,” he said. “No – it’s an alien life form!”
He went on to say that the internet would completely change the dynamics of consumption: “The interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
Paxman, off camera, presumably pulled a face, but Bowie was proved right. He was not the first person to say these things but, as he had done so many times in his career, Bowie was synthesising ideas from the margins and delivering them to the mainstream. Case in point: as part of the marketing for Hours…, Bowie ran a competition asking fans to help finish the lyrics on the track What’s Really Happening?, which was posted in demo form online. Alex Grant, a 20-year-old fan from Ohio, won and the recording of the song was streamed online using a 360-degree camera. Grant received a songwriting credit alongside Bowie and Reeves Gabrels. Bowie said: “The most gratifying part of the evening for me was being able to encourage Alex and his pal Larry to sing on the song that he, Alex, had written. It was a cool way to finish the session off.” It was described on Bowie’s website as “the first true cyber-song”.
Choosing his words diplomatically, Andrew Pollock, vice president of marketing for HMV North America, told Billboard: “Obviously we prefer to stick with more traditional methods. But this is the wave of the future, and we all need to start preparing for that.”
The album was only available in the US in its digital incarnation before the CD release, but British retailers were concerned this was the start of something that could undermine their business. Brian McLaughlin, chairman of music retailer trade body Bard and MD of HMV Europe, insisted that UK labels must “make their international affiliates aware of the potentially disrupting effects such internet initiatives will have if they can be accessed in this country”. He added: “This exciting development, however, must be managed to the benefit of all parties.”
While there were heavy hints about a retailer boycott of labels or artists if they tried something similar in the UK, much of this was posturing. In the Netherlands, however, the chain Free Record Shop claimed it would pull all his albums from its shelves. In the US, meanwhile, Carl Singmaster, founder of the Manifest chain, claimed releasing an album as a download two weeks ahead of the physical disc is “driving customers to online and teaching them stores are not cool and [are] passé”.
With tempers already frayed, Bowie himself looked at the rage gripping the retail community and thought it could be cranked up a lot higher. “Mark my words … we are not going back to record companies and through shops,” he said. “Within five years it will have moved so spectacularly that no one will recognise the music business.”
“I’m loth to say it, being a huge Bowie fan, but it was upsetting business-wise,” says Glen Ward, president and CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, who was busy trying to establish a beachhead for the Virgin Megastore brand in the US in 1999. “I could see why he was doing it – just pushing the boundaries, [taking] the opportunity to raise awareness. But from a business perspective, it was irksome to say the least.” Matt Black, one half of Coldcut and co-founder of the Ninja Tune label, was an early adopter of digital and a flag-waver for the possibilities of the internet. But even he has sympathy for the traditional retailers who took this as a huge betrayal. “If I was a record shop selling vinyl, a Bowie fan probably working my ass off to try and promote that album, I would have been quite pissed off.”
But the Bowie album release was happening at a time when using the internet, let alone buying products on the internet, was not a quotidian activity. According to research from Computer Industry Almanac, there were 147 million people globally who accessed the internet at least once a week in 1998. That was more than double the 61 million people accessing the internet weekly in 1996. But being online was one thing – in 1999 there was still enormous hesitancy about paying for content online. This was partly due to a presumption that everything online should be free, but it was mainly down to anxiety about handing over bank details to website operators.
In the 13 November issue of Billboard, reporter Ed Christman suggested that Bowie was making bold predictions that could not support their own weight. He wrote that EMI/Virgin had revealed that Hours… had sold just 989 downloads in its two-week exclusivity period, versus 29,000 copies in its first week in bricks-and-mortar stores in the US. “The number of people willing to pay for music in the download format right now appears to be in the 1,000–2,000 range,” he wrote, “and I would even question that number.” He speculated that a substantial chunk of those 989 download sales came from curious people in the music industry who were merely “checking out this newfangled downloading thingamajig”.
Jay Samit, then senior vice president of new media at EMI Recorded Music, reflects on Hours… a quarter of a century on. “Bowie was very forwardthinking and excellent to work with,” he says. “The one regret, which luckily nobody picked up on time, was that the album was called Hours… which is exactly how long it took to download an album back then!” According to EMI, 23.9% of consumers buying the Bowie album as a download needed technical assistance, but the label said that it was expecting that number to be higher. “If your phone rang at that time [you were downloading], if you were using a mixed line, you had to start the whole process all over,” Samit says. While the release garnered “tons of press”, he says, “not a lot of people actually knew how to download an album.”
Nevertheless, he argues that this was yet another case of Bowie signposting the future. “It was about educating other artists; about making sure that Silicon Valley wants to put money behind these digital music companies so that they continue to fund this experimentation.” In educating the music industry and venture capitalists, Samit says, Bowie “was very effective”.
Simon Wright, managing director of Virgin Retail UK says Bowie “understood his customer. He was catering to his customer demand. And he was the one with the foresight. If the record industry had had the mindset of David Bowie, it may have been able to ride this whole period much better.”
From the vantage point of 2024, the threats, recriminations and the panic surrounding an album being sold as a download in 1999 seem archaic. Yet this album and how it was released represented a breaking apart of the old way of doing things, and a litmus test for the music industry. Do you want to just skip to tomorrow today? Or do you want to keep living in yesterday until it suffocates you?
• Extracted from 1999 – The Year the Record Industry Lost Control by Eamonn Forde, published 7 March by Omnibus Press. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Mark my words … we are not going back to record companies and through shops
David Bowie