David Bowie, who passed away on Monday after an 18-month battle with cancer, was a musical pioneer, thanks to his artistic blending of rock and pop and also a seemingly endless series of gender-bending personas. But Bowie was also a visionary when it came to the business of music and the future of that business.
In 1998, for example, at a time when most musical artists had probably not even heard of the Internet, Bowie launched his own Internet service provider or ISP called BowieNet. “If I was 19 again, I’d bypass music and go right to the internet,” he said at the time. In 1996 he was one of the first major artists to release a song as an online-only release.
Bowie was also an early fan of music-sharing services like Napster, at a time when the record industry and virtually every other mainstream musician thought the service was the creation of the devil. He accurately predicted a future in which record labels and traditional distribution models would be disrupted, potentially even obliterated.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
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