Bowie, Music, and the Internet

David Bowie on an interview with Jeremy Paxman from the BBC said that in the 80s and 90s music started becoming more about the subgroups and the communities than the artists. To him the epitome is the rave, where the crowd is as important as the performer, if not more.

He said in 1999 that the Internet had created a fragmentation of views, and that we weren’t even at the tip of the iceberg of what the Internet would do to society. “It’s not a tool, it’s an alien lifeform.”

Paxman insisted that it was just a different delivery system, Bowie honed in on how the state of content would be beyond anything we imagined. He said that the interplay between the user and the provider would change our ideas of what mediums were all about.

“Do you know how expensive it is to get involved in the internet?”

I knew the Internet was going to be bigger than just a medium, but did not call remix culture, and Patreon, and the creator economy like he did.

We lost Bowie too soon. I can’t imagine the things he would have gotten up to with crypto. Nevermind NFTs, he would have gone nuts with creator tokens - he actually launched Bowie Bonds to securitize his collection back in the 90s.

The man was talking about how the Internet would blur the line between creators and users through sharing and mixing a full year before Metallica whined in court about how Napster was being mean to them.

You can watch the whole interview below.

Published: 2020-10-13