Time May Change Me(dia)

David Bowie is dead.While others will do more justice to the career of one of the most multi-faceted artists ever, there’s an important thing to note about Bowie’s contribution to the way content is consumed way back from 1999. During his emergence from his electronic period (which gave us the wonderful Afraid Of Americans), Bowie released Hours… which not only saw Bowie’s return to live instrumentation, but, perhaps more importantly, was the first album by a major artist to be released for paid download prior to its physical ship date.As the Times wrote in 1999, users could download Liquid Audio or Microsoft Audio 4.0 in order to download the full album for $18. The EMI/Virgin owned Musicmaker.com sold the album for $12.95, or at the now familiar $.99 per song.Bowie was not the first artist to provide a full album by means of the Internet, but he was the highest profile artist to do so. The Times noted that The Beastie Boys had released live tracks recorded from a tour and that the noted “indie rock duo” They Might Be Giants, had released an album on EMusic.com while between labels.According to a CMJ New Music Report in January of 2000, it was this TMBG album that was the top legally downloaded record of 1999, which incidentally coincided with the same year that “mp3” replaced “sex” as the most commonly searched term.In an interview with MTV News, then Senior Vice President of New Media for Virgin Media, Jay Samit stated that the “experiment” was “all part of [Virgin’s] overall strategy in moving forward into digital distribution.” Samit added that Virgin felt the internet to be akin to a physical destination, one where they “open[ed] a store in this great new location where a lot of people live and it didn’t occur to you that you didn’t buy a cash register.” At the time, all the experiments were being conducted with physical retailers in mind so as not to cut into their profits, while keeping abreast of the newly emerging Napster culture.At the time of release, a T1 line would take an estimated 7 to 8 minutes to download the full album. A 28.8 KB modem would take up to five hours and require that no one use the phone during this entire time. This morning, on hearing the news, most of us turned to digital platforms like Spotify or YouTube to instantly stream a near full discography and pay tribute to the Man Who Sold The World.