Boy, but it sure took the RIAA •years• to figure out that suing fans (aka “customers”) wasn’t the greatest idea…
Yeah, now they use Spotify to rip off their artists and their customers even harder.
Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
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Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#12Still 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 dram…
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.
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#13Sounds 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...
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#14One 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.
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#15David 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.
Didn't he also bring out a song where the lyrics were algorithmically generated?
Verbasizer - a sentence randomizer app he designed for writing the album’s lyrics.
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#16Still 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 dram…
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.
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#17Sounds 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 u…
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...
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't he also bring out a song where the lyrics were algorithmically generated?
Verbasizer - a sentence randomizer app he designed for writing the album’s lyrics.
See too Gysin/Burroughs c. 1959.[0]
Bowie would have been ~12yo.
[0] https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques...
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#19Sounds 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 u…
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.
Re: Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
#20Boy, but it sure took the RIAA •years• to figure out that suing fans (aka “customers”) wasn’t the greatest idea…
To be fair it is incredibly hard to think clearly with the haze of booze and cocaine that fuels the music industry.