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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Jonny Greenwood started The Smile with jazz drummer Tom Skinner because he was frustrated with the slow progress of releasing content with Radiohead who have famously stayed independent and in control after fulfilling their initial EMI contract.
He was wanting put music out fast and often, "90% polished" with none of the baggage of Radiohead's legacy or expectations.
After bringing in Thom Yorke they have 3 albums in as many years and just release stuff randomly as it's ready. Pure creativity and a lot of it is more than good enough to satisfy my Radiohead itch.
While there are a few never finished/published Radiohead era tracks like Skrting on the Surface, most of it comes out of the trio jamming together.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
When I got my first high-speed internet and bought a 4x1 ethernet router/switch, I remember wondering what else I could network since I only had two computers to connect. I really wanted to somehow connect to the music gear in the main bedroom, but I never did.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
I would say that the music industry has only recovered in the last two decades. Not done well. Internet piracy famously cut the legs out from physical album sales in the early 2000's and the music industry was not prepared for that shift. Sales and budgets for physical music is now a shadow of it's former self. Not to mention how artists are often the worst off financially today because of the crummy payouts of streaming music, which has largely replaced the purchasing of records.
> I would say that the music industry has only recovered in the last two decades.
Do you have revenue numbers? (I don't.)
> Internet piracy famously cut the legs out from physical album sales in the early 2000's
No way. The Internet destroyed physical album sales. Are you suggesting that if it wasn't for piracy, people would still be buying CDs? The Internet also destroyed print newpapers, software sales on CD, locally installed software generally, brick-and-mortar sales of anything that can be shipped, and lots more. Is that all due to file sharing?
> artists are often the worst off financially today because of the crummy payouts of streaming music
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?).
Weird Al wrote an open letter to this effect more than a decade ago, but he broke through again to be Spoticific… Fairly certain that letter is older than Spotify, but this is 2023…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
He was wanting put music out fast and often, "90% polished" with none of the baggage of Radiohead's legacy or expectations.
After bringing in Thom Yorke they have 3 albums in as many years and just release stuff randomly as it's ready. Pure creativity and a lot of it is more than good enough to satisfy my Radiohead itch.
While there are a few never finished/published Radiohead era tracks like Skrting on the Surface, most of it comes out of the trio jamming together.
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.
Weinstein and JayZ taught us that plenty of men have the same problem...
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/oct/25/sque...
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.
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).
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...
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.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/04/13/the-internet-is-punk-ro...
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-...
Bowie would have been ~12yo.
[0] https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques...
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
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
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...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrOMTr...
Tray-based CD players had a separate, smaller, indent of about 2.5" (6.35cm :) diameter which would accept them.
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.
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.
We play a similar game today, with social media managers.
"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".
I think Bowie was also the first artist to sell his back catalog to an investment vehicle.
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.)
How was and is it trouble for the music industry? They've done very well in the Internet era.
Do you have revenue numbers? (I don't.)
> Internet piracy famously cut the legs out from physical album sales in the early 2000's
No way. The Internet destroyed physical album sales. Are you suggesting that if it wasn't for piracy, people would still be buying CDs? The Internet also destroyed print newpapers, software sales on CD, locally installed software generally, brick-and-mortar sales of anything that can be shipped, and lots more. Is that all due to file sharing?
> artists are often the worst off financially today because of the crummy payouts of streaming music
How is that the fault of file sharing?
<shaking my head sadly>
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2023/11/30/weird-al-spotify...
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.