‘The internet is an alien life form’: how David Bowie created a market for digital music

Bowie’s 1999 album Hours… was the first to go on sale online before hitting regular stores – and his experimentation caused horror in the music industry

It is far from his best album, and not even his best album of the 1990s, but Hours... is David Bowie’s most significant album that decade. Not because of the music, however, but how it was released: the first album by a major artist on a major label to emerge as a download before it arrived physically.

Writing about the album in August 1999 ahead of its September release, Rolling Stone called Hours… a “cyber-coup”: a continuation of Bowie’s fascination with releasing music online, which he started with the Telling Lies single in 1996. He had also enthusiastically embraced webcasting and created his own internet service provider with BowieNet in 1998. “I couldn’t be more pleased to have the opportunity of moving the music industry closer to the process of making digital downloads available as the norm and not the exception,” is how Bowie explained the Hours… release at the time. “We are all aware that broadband opportunities are not yet available to the overwhelming majority of people, and therefore expect the success of this experiment to be measured in hundreds and not thousands of downloads. However, just as colour television broadcasts and film content on home video tapes were required first steps to cause their industries to expand consumer use, I am hopeful that this small step will lead to larger leaps by myself and others ultimately giving consumers greater choices and easier access to the music they enjoy.”