<shaking my head sadly>
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2023/11/30/weird-al-spotify...
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).
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.
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 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.
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).
Weinstein and JayZ taught us that plenty of men have the same problem...
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/oct/25/sque...
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.
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.
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...
Tray-based CD players had a separate, smaller, indent of about 2.5" (6.35cm :) diameter which would accept them.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrOMTr...
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.
I think Bowie was also the first artist to sell his back catalog to an investment vehicle.
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://blog.adafruit.com/2020/04/13/the-internet-is-punk-ro...
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.
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-...
"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".
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?
We play a similar game today, with social media managers.
Wonder if he was related to Hilary Rosen[0]. She was ... not popular ... during the "Napster Bad" period.
zirkonit•18h ago
LaundroMat•16h ago
philk10•16h ago
bch•16h ago
Bowie would have been ~12yo.
[0] https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques...
508LoopDetected•15h ago
sys_64738•12h ago
hluska•11h ago