Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996

Summary

Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996 Online music retail was thriving by 1996, thanks to sites like Music Boulevard and CDnow. But music downloads and streaming was more of a challenge — as David Bowie discovered in September 1996. By Richard MacManus | May 7, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, 1996 The CD version of David Bowie's online single, 'Telling Lies', 1996; via kupindo.com. In an interview featured in the 1998 book “The Interactive Music Handbook,” Larry Rosen — CEO of an online music services company called N2K — provided his theory on how the internet would overhaul the music distribution system. “The model that’s eventually going to prevail is one where the artist is going to finance her own record, produce it, and divide the distribution rights up.” After explaining that the artist will no longer need to be signed to a record company for multiple years, Rosen said she would instead “go to a company like N2K and have us distribute the record electronically, or to all the people you have online in those particular areas, and we’re going to receive “X” percentage of these sales.” So that was the goal of David Bowie’s digital partner, N2K: to distribute an artist’s music online and cut out the middlemen, a.k.a. the record labels. After all, the primary task of a record label was to distribute music, so surely they would no longer be needed when the internet matured? David Bowie's website, October 1996; via Wayback Machine. By 1996, the retail part of online music existed, but not the electronic distribution part. At that time, buying music online meant purchasing a CD — or some other physical format provided by a record label — on a retail website like Music Boulevard (owned by N2K) or CDnow (its arch-rival). Although the pioneering Internet Underground Music Archive had proven that downloading music as a digital file was possible, the low bandwidth of the era made it hugely impractical. But Rosen thought that, eventually, records would be able to ...