David Bowie, the legendary glam singer, fashion icon, gender provocateur and cultural touchstone who died Sunday at the age of 69, was also a business entrepreneur of formidable foresight. As we remember him today, it’s worth looking back at one of the roles likely to be eclipsed by his stratospheric status as the most important glam rocker of all time: tech visionary.
It’s not just that David Bowie changed things or grokked that change is inevitable -- hey, he wrote some song about it! Bowie understood changes decades before they happened, when others rolled their eyes. “Digital natives” who remember the artist primarily as the uber-mulleted Goblin King of Labyrinth may be surprised to learn he both understood and prepared for the radical transformation that would be wrought by a nascent Internet ages before the entertainment industry or lawmakers attempted to wrap their heads around it.
"The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious, and chaotic and nihilistic," Bowie told British journalist Jeremy Paxman in a 2000 interview that resurfaced on YouTube following his death. Between Silicon Valley heralding the Internet as the savior of humanity and naysayers who decry it as our hateful doom, it’s refreshing to hear Bowie speak intelligently and honestly about this morally neutral development.
"Forget about the
By then, Bowie was already making a significant investment in his audience, or rather, allowing them to invest in him. Bowie Bonds, launched in 1997, gave his fans creditor stake in his song royalties -- $55 million worth were sold. Despite post-Napster challenges to music industry profits, investors made out big. Heavy Metal band Iron Monster and Funk legend James Brown issued their own bonds.
In 1998, the year before Napster launched -- notoriously crashing high-speed networks in college dorms across the United States -- Bowie launched BowieNet via the tech company he co-founded, Ultrastar, which specialized subscription-based private ISPs for niche fan communities.A combination
BowieWorld took so long to load on what can now only be laughably described as “high speed” connections, it was advisable to have some corporeal reading material on hand while you waited. Once in, you got your own avatar to control through the 3D environment for however long it took until the computer inevitably crashed. For those of us with patience, it was worth the wait to get a look at was was also promised in Bowie’s music and groundbreaking videos -- the future.
Unlike, say, Metallica and Trent Reznor, Bowie saw as inevitable the changes wrought by Napster -- the peer-to-peer service which allowed fans to share music files of even the most hard-to-find recordings. Prior to its legal woes over copyrights, this “community” had 80,000 registered members at its peak, an astronomical number in 1999. On the UK morning show The Big Breakfast in 2000 -- three years before
“'I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way,'' Bowie told the New York Times way back in 2002. ''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.”
Bowie was always avant-garde in all things, including business.
