Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996
Published on: 2025-07-26 05:58:41
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.
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 a
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