The Forgettable David Bowie

 Song That Changed the Music

 Industry Forever

“I am the future / I’m tomorrow / I am the end.” — David Bowie, “Telling Lies”

If the music industry was going to undergo a tumultuous shift, it might as well have had David Bowie providing the soundtrack. On September 11th, 1996, Bowie’s “Telling Lies” became the first ever downloadable single by a major artist, arriving on Bowie’s website in three different formats, released over three weeks (a traditional single was later released in November).

As a song, “Telling Lies” is … well, it’s pretty generic drum ‘n’ bass with some brooding Bowie lyrics (“swear to me in times of war and stress”) and no real hook. It’s dark and maybe reflects the singer’s time spent touring as a co-headliner with Nine Inch Nails earlier that year. As AllMusic noted at the time about Earthling, the album from which “Lies” served as the first single, “The record frequently sounds as if the beats were simply grafted on top of pre-existing songs. Never are the songs broken open by a new form; they are fairly conventional Bowie songs with fancy production.”

But we’re not here to discuss mid-’90s Bowie records, a staple of bargain bins for years to come. Even if his output was uneven during the decade, Bowie certainly was one step ahead when it came to technology — he launched his own internet service provider, BowieNet, in 1998 (he also issued part of his music catalog as “Bowie Bonds” in 1997, a financial move that pre-dates the very current trend of classic rock artists selling their publishing rights … and unlike those artists, Bowie got his songs and royalty income back).

Let’s be clear: in 1996, you could find music on the Internet, although there weren’t any mainstream streaming or peer-to-peer sites, and iTunes was nearly five years away. Two years before Bowie, Aerosmith released “Head First,” an unused track from their Get a Grip sessions, as a free WAV download on CompuServe, which might be the most 1994 sentence ever.

But the “Telling Lies” single represented a conscious effort by a major music label to appeal to a growing legion of web users who, surprise, really liked music.