Strange Fascinaton After seeing some comments …
Strange Fascinaton
After seeing some comments I made about David Bowie’s Internet ventures in the Big Issue magazine, business writer Glenn Rifkin (author of Radical Marketing, amongst others), approached me asking for some more in-depth opinion - for what it’s worth, here’s my unexpurgurated answers…
1) How would you characterize Bowie’s move to the Internet? Every pop star has a website these days but Bowie seems to have taken it much further. Your thoughts.
Bowie’s move to the Net appears to come from a genuine curiosity about the possibilties of the digital age rather than just seeing the Web as another marketing tool, or the need to have a website to keep up with other artists. Read any recent interview with Bowie and he’s massively enthusiastic about the Internet’s potential - it’s probably his major passion at the moment because it’s another creative medium for him, just like music, acting, painting etc. Bowie is a voracious reader and knowledge seeker (his numerous changes of image are all the result of his combination of various historical and cultural influences), so it’s easy to see why the Net’s vast library of information initially attracted him.
2)Do you feel that what he is doing is setting a direction for others to follow?
It’s hard to name another music artist who’s done as much as quickly on the Net as Bowie. Although that does have the caveat that you can only enjoy the depth of his site if you pay a subscription fee. This in itself is quite radical, because paying for content on the Web is universally seen as one of the most difficult things to persuade internet users to do. To be honest, paying that fee is fairly symbolic - I don’t think Bowie is making a profit from it. “It barely keeps me in cigarettes” he commented in one interview. But it does set the precedent that people are willing to pay for the depth of access to Bowie that Bowienet offers.
3)How crucial is his personal involvement to the success of the site? He is known to spend hours in chat rooms and is heavily involved in choosing content for the site.
It’s absolutely vital. Bowie directs the entire look and content of Bowienet, as well as writing a regular journal and hanging around the discussion areas. To be able to chat live to Bowie in a chat room or swop posts with him on the discussion boards is the key to Bowienet’s success - both because it offers unprecedented access for fans to their musical hero, and because it acts as an indication of Bowie’s genuine interest in the welfare of the site and his fans. This was borne out by Bowie playing a free concert in New York last June exclusively for Bowienet members. Take away Bowie and Bowienet becomes just another fan site.
It also has to be remembered that Bowie has a colourful, outrageous and frequently controversial history, and so has a vast legacy of personal mythology to draw on. This may sound a little pretentious, but there is a continual fascination both among the older and upcoming generations about Bowie’s history and his huge creative output. This fascination is precisely what fuels the message boards and the content of the site, generating a genuine online community.
4)Despite his often bizarre images, Bowie has shown a keen business sense throughout his career. In particular, his decision to float a bond issue around future earnings of his masters, which netted him about $57 million, has been admired and followed by others in the industry. How does Bowie manage to embrace the business side so deftly without turning off his fans, many of whom probably still believe that rock and roll and big business are strange bedfellows?
I’d disagree with that. Post Live Aid, rock’n'roll has become synonymous with big business. The Rolling Stones made more money from their last tour than the gross national product of several Third World countries combined. People have become used to rock stars being millionaires, and not just the old ones - because media and marketing are so potent and global these days, one good album is enough to make a million. A lot of acts are referred to as “corporate rock” or “manufactured” - put together artificially to make maximum money in a particular market (usually young teens).
Within that sort of climate, someone like Bowie who invests money in Bowienet, the art book publishing company 23, the magazine Modern Painters, becomes a maverick. He had the luxury of being able to sink money into projects without the need to make profit precisely because he has been so shrewd on the stock market. That, of course, is not to say that those companies are run badly - but their primary motivation to exist is NOT to generate profit. And it should be remembered that Bowie has become so sharp with money precisely because he was royally screwed over by his manager Tony DeFries and the MainMan management company during the early 70s.
5)For all the praise it has received, BowieNet is still just a beginning. Where can he take all this, in your opinion? What are the opportunities for entertainers on the Internet?
Bowie’s embracement of making his music available via Bowienet - I think his entire back catalogue is now available for download, but naturally you have to pay for it - is because he recognises the Net is the future primary distribution mechanism of music. When broadband net access becomes prevalent in the next five years, downloading an album with CD quality sound will become a major method of music consumption. For Bowie and other artists, this means they can bypass their record companies and release material direct to their fans.
I don’t think this signals the death of record companies at all, because there are few artists with the capital backing of Bowie to be able to finance the recording and distribution - Internet or otherwise - of their music. But it’s certainly scared the music industry witless because they perceive their huge mark-ups on the price of CDs will be eroded. (Don’t forget that in the UK we pay on average �12-�15 per CD - $20 - $24 - compared to $12-$15 for the same CD in the States).
The Net provides a potent means for bands to have a much better degree of autonomy from the dictates of their record labels, and distribute music much more cheaply than requiring it to be burned onto a CD. The key issue is whether they have the savvy to exploit this potential.
6) In that regard, while the debate rages around Napster and how the music business will find peace and harmony on the Internet, does Bowie put himself at any risk by openly siding with the Napster crowd?
Bowie has recognised that Napster has let the Net music genie out of the bottle. Napster will probably be shut down, but the idea of swopping music files is now commonplace to hundreds of thousands of music fans around the world. Moreover, it’s still yet to be proved that Napster does actually harm record sales, whatever Metallica say. Napster seems to actually act as a huge marketing tool, allowing people to hear music they’d otherwise never come across because they would need to pay before hearing it. And that results in more rather than less record sales. People like to own the artifact of an album - record sleeve and all. That, incidentally, is also the biggest challenge to making Net distribution of music in the future mainstream - to give the sense of buying something tangible rather than just a tangle of data.
7)Not that you are a business writer, but do you see any lessons that other businesses can take from Bowie while making their own transitions to the Internet?
Personal service would be the number one. Post an intelligent question on the Bowienet boards and you may well get a response from him - how many CEOs can say that about their website? How many CEOs, for that matter, have the faintest idea how their own websites work? Bowienet works because Bowie gets the Web, and he gets that clever graphics and bleeding edge technologies are no substitute for human response and interaction, albeit through chat rooms and discussion boards.
Charging for premium would have to be the other - it’s the Grail of almost every site on the Net - to have content people are willing to pay to access. Figuring out ways to do this and making users feel like their getting a good deal - indeed, a bargain - is the next big step in the future of business on the Net.
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- David Bowie Gets Nasty
- Bowie Manager To Spill The Beans
- The Last Word Well, judging from the length of …
- Ready Or Not
- Noodling In The Name Of Art
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