After BowieNet, David Bowie Goes Dark and Shuns Social Media

DavidBowie.com, January 8, 2013.

After 2004, the rise of the social web — and especially platforms like MySpace and Facebook — made niche social networks like BowieNet less relevant in the culture. This shift coincided with the slow decline of BowieNet itself. The portal and ISP had launched in 1998 and had two major redesigns (in 2000 and 2003), but when David Bowie suffered a heart attack during the Reality world tour in 2004 — leading to a long period of inactivity in the music industry — his website fell into a kind of stasis too.

Slowly, BowieNet was dismantled. In 2006, the ISP service was quietly shut down — most likely because UltraStar, its corporate owner (in which Bowie was a shareholder) had pivoted to become an online fan club business. In an April 2006 press release touting a new partnership with Ticketmaster, UltraStar described its offering as “community-based subscription clubs delivered over the web.” As well as Bowie, its clients at this time included Sting, Counting Crows, INXS, Mariah Carey, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and The Rolling Stones.

UltraStar website, Bowie profile, 2006. Via Wayback Machine.

Sometime in 2006, Live Nation — at the time just an events promoter — acquired a controlling interest in Ultrastar, and by September 2007 it had bought the remaining shares. Live Nation was buying up a lot of small music-related companies at this time, leading to its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster, which turned it into a full-fledged industry gorilla. So UltraStar was now just a tiny part of a multinational.

Not coincidentally, there were fewer and fewer updates to BowieNet during this time — and certainly no more redesigns. The site continued to promote Bowie re-issues and merch, as well as providing commentary on Bowie’s rare public appearances. But it had lost its vitality, and Bowie himself seemed to have lost interest in the site.

Fast-forward to 2012 and, incredibly, davidbowie.com still has the now 9-year-old Flash design of the Reality era. Flash was very much in decline as a web technology by this point — indeed, Apple stopped supporting Flash Player on its iOS devices in 2010, so Bowie’s website would have been at least partly inaccessible to iPhone owners. The content was just as outdated. “David’s Welcome Message” was still promoting the Reality album and world tour, while the “What’s New” section had stopped like an old clock on May 24, 2010.

David Bowie's website at the end of 2012 — little had changed since 2003.

On March 15, 2012, the official David Bowie Facebook page formally announced what was plainly obvious: "the old Bowienet, as we have known it, is kaput!” Whoever wrote this (and it certainly wasn’t the man himself) added that they had “no access to either the message boards or our newsletter service." Facebook was the platform most likely to reach the biggest number of Bowie fans, so that’s why the closure of BowieNet was confirmed there. The post promised a new website, but it would be “a basic version to primarily deliver news.” Existing BowieNet members would regain access to their email and message boards, but new member signups would be discontinued.

Bowie Facebook Page, March 2012. It was mostly used for nostalgic fan posts. Bowie himself did not use Facebook.

It was the end of an era. Meanwhile, many Bowie fan sites had also either stopped updating or gone offline altogether. Like BowieNet, Teenage Wildlife was still stuck in 2003 — its homepage in March 2012 featured news about the upcoming Reality tour and there was little sign of life elsewhere on the site. Another long-time Bowie fan site, Stefan Bassman’s David Bowie Page, had largely stopped updating by 2006. Its proprietor, Stefan Westman, had also run The David Bowie Web Ring — a Geocities website that ran right up until Geocities itself was shut down by Yahoo, in October 2009.

As for David Bowie himself, from 2004 to the announcement on his Facebook page in March 2012, he'd made only sporadic public appearances. One noteworthy instance was receiving a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from The Webbys in 2007, the so-called “Oscars of the internet.” The award was for “pushing the boundaries of art and technology with his digital empire," including BowieNet and UltraStar. Bowie was just the second musician to receive the lifetime achievement award, a year after Prince.

David Bowie accepting his Webby Award in NYC on June 3, 2007. Via Webbys website.

And that was it for Bowie’s involvement with the internet, including his own website. Right up until January 8, 2013 — his 66th birthday — when davidbowie.com unexpectedly came to life again.

The Next Day

News spread fast on Facebook and Twitter that Bowie had released his first new music in nearly a decade, with no pre-publicity. It was a single, “Where are we now?”, along with the impending release of a new album, The Next Day. As long-time fan Dara O’Kearney put it, Bowie had ”simply put the new song up at his website, and the world went crazy.”

Finally, the Reality-era Flash design of davidbowie.com was banished. There was now a new splash page — not Flash, but plain old HTML and images — advertising the new releases. The primary image was of Bowie’s face obscured by a large grey square, mirroring the album cover. There was a link to the single’s video on Vimeo, along with links to buy the single and pre-order the album on iTunes. “Welcome to the relaunched DavidBowie.com and a whole bunch of exciting new things that you've no doubt already found on the splash page,” announced the site.

Relaunch blog post; January 8, 2013.

BowieNet was no more, but the website was back…David Bowie was back!

The sudden, surprise release of the album was seemingly a counter-intuitive move in the always-on age of social media. But keeping news of the album — which had been worked on for about two years — out of the chattering fingers of smartphone owners turned out to be a master stroke. The news of Bowie’s return dominated Twitter, Facebook and other social media services when it was announced on January 8, 2013. This “album drop” tactic was later adopted by other major artists, like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

The secrecy around the album even extended to the reasons why the website was being redesigned, after so many years of neglect. “We worked on his new website and couldn’t tell the programmers why it was being restyled,” said graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, who was in charge of both the album cover and the web design. “All along the way, we had to lie to people about our reasons for doing things.”

After clicking through from the splash page, January 8, 2013. Via Wayback Machine.

Much had changed in the media landscape since the release of Reality in 2003. Back then there were no smartphones or tablets, no YouTube or Spotify, and no Twitter or Facebook. But a decade later, everybody had a voice (although the downside was that nobody listened to each other). Now you could consume media everywhere you went, and comment on anything at any time.

So how did the man himself adapt to this new era of ubiquitous internet? One can imagine a millennial version of Ziggy Stardust with his own YouTube channel and daily poses on Instagram. But no, 66-year old David Bowie took the complete opposite approach. He turned into late-era Greta Garbo, refusing to do interviews and not having a social media presence.

“The silence is part of it,” said Gerry Leonard, one of the guitarists on The Next Day. “He’s letting the record come out, letting the artwork out, letting the video out. In his mind, those are the artistic statements – not getting on the phone with everybody and setting it up with all kinds of chatter.”

The official Bowie Twitter account in January 2013, at which point it was simply syndicating the Facebook Page feed.

The Next Day was officially released on March 8, 2013. Coincidentally, a couple of months after that, the French electronic duo Daft Punk released their first album in 8 years: Random Access Memories. This album, named after a form of computer memory, commonly referred to as RAM — directly commented on the digital age and was an artistic response to it. As the music critic Simon Reynolds wrote in a review:

“Spurning the digital audio software that empowers the EDM [Electronic Dance Music] generation, the album is an analogue flashback to the era of live musicianship, involving a crack squad of session players and contributions from disco legends Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder.”

The presence of Nile Rodgers on RAM provided a thin connection to David Bowie, since Rodgers had produced Let’s Dance 30 years prior. But more to the point, it’s in their contrary ways of dealing with an all-encompassing digital life that ties Daft Punk and Bowie together, at least in their 2013 guises. Reynolds later characterised RAM as Daft Punk’s “falling out of digital love,” adding that “if Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories comes to define 2013, it’ll be through rejecting 2013.”

With Bowie, it wasn’t so much that he rejected the digital life, but that he wanted it to conform to him — not the other way around, as it was (and still is) for the rest of us.

Blackstar

By the time of Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday on January 8, 2016, Bowie was on a different plane. “Dropped my cell phone down below,” he sang on the song “Lazarus.” He knew there was no use for cell phones, or the internet, where he was headed:

Look up here, I'm in heaven I've got scars that can't be seen I've got drama, can't be stolen Everybody knows me now

Front page of DavidBowie.com, January 8, 2016.

David Bowie died two days later, on January 10, 2016.

Everything changed after that. World politics took a bizarre turn, climate change ramped up, the pandemic hit, global conflicts escalated, AI emerged. As humanity roiled in chaos, the internet became ever-more controlled — increasingly under the thumb of Big Tech platforms. As Green Day later put it in a song, “ever since Bowie died, it hasn’t been the same” (from their 2024 song, “Strange Days Are Here to Stay”).

Bowie's website, the day after his death on January 10, 2016. Via Wayback Machine.

Near the end of 2016, on a chilly Saturday night, I attended a showing of the Lazarus stage show at the King's Cross Theatre in London. Accompanying me were my wife and fifteen-year old daughter. In truth, I was much more looking forward to the show than they were — being a long-time Bowie fan and with his death in January still front of mind for me.

Alongside his album Blackstar, the musical Lazarus was the last creative thing Bowie had been involved in. He’d always wanted to produce a stage show, going back to the time in 1974 when he tried to stage a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 (he couldn’t get the rights, but he turned that idea into the Diamond Dogs album and tour). Over forty years later, he and Dublin playwright Enda Walsh wrote Lazarus: a sequel to ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’, the 1976 film he’d starred in playing an alien called Thomas Newton.

Lazarus musical; image via westendtheatre.com via Wayback Machine.

Although the stage show continued the general themes of the film — alienation, lost love, numbing yourself with TV and alcohol — it was more opaque. Some of the play takes place inside Newton’s mind, and we as the audience are unsure which characters are real and which are invented by Newton. Certainly I was confused watching it in London in December 2016 (and my teenage daughter tuned out, surreptitiously pulling out her iPhone during the performance). But visually it was stunning, and I was impressed by the songs; especially Newton actor Michael C. Hall’s performance of the title song.

This way or no way, you know I'll be free Just like that bluebird, ain't that just like me?

The play had begun its run off-Broadway in December 2015, a month before Bowie’s death, and initially critics were baffled. The New York Times called it a “great-sounding, great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie.” The Guardian’s reviewer said it was “almost incomprehensible” yet “oddly intriguing.” But when I saw the show a year later, it was difficult to separate Bowie’s legend from the Newton character. Even if I didn’t understand the plot, Bowie’s death had lent an extra layer of pathos to proceedings. When Newton speaks these lines near the end of the play, I found myself tearing up:

“I’m done with this life — so a new universe I’ll dream big up there. And although always stuck inside this breaking mind — I’ve stepped off this Earth and into that better place. An imagined world.”

But what a life it had been, down here on earth. Yes, Bowie’s creative star had shone brightest during his youth, in the 1970s. Then he conquered MTV and the mainstream pop world in the early 1980s. But every good play needs a third act, and for David Bowie that was the 1990s and early 2000s — played out in parallel with the emergence of digital culture.

Bowie had dabbled in CD-ROMs, tapped into the internet zeitgeist for his most innovative album in years (1995’s Outside), was among the first artists to release music online, did a “cybercast” concert before it was even technically feasible, and — most impressively of all — built an online community for his fans in 1998, years before social media arrived. Through it all, he had used the internet as a tool to further expand his art and deepen his connection to his fans.

David Bowie in the video for Blackstar. Via Bowie YouTube channel.

The 1990s and early 2000s were a time of great change for all of us, as the world transformed from analogue to digital. But nowadays, “down below,” many of us use the internet as a crutch. We’re hooked on algorithmic news feeds, our smartphones too easily accessible to give us a dopamine hit when the need arises — which is frequently, given the state of the world around us.

Let’s not forget, though, that the internet can also be a well of inspiration and meaningful connection. We live in a virtualized world now, that can’t be denied. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon our creative impulses, or our willingness to adapt — to change in response to the times. To create change in the world, even. Because if there’s one thing we can all learn from David Bowie’s life, it’s to “turn and face the strange.”

Perhaps Bowie’s final message to us, in the title track of his last album Blackstar, was that you can be your own star. You’re a force of nature too. You can have eagles in your daydreams and diamonds in your eyes. You can be a blackstar, just like him.

Something happened on the day he died Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried (I'm a blackstar, I'm a blackstar)

---

This is part of a series about the history of BowieNet and David Bowie's website:

1. 1995-1997: David Bowie’s Early Websites: Outside to Earthling
2. 1996: Telling Lies; Bowie and Online Music Distribution
3. 1996-1998: BowieNet, The Inside Story of Its Creation
4. 1998: Launch of BowieNet and the First Inklings of Social Networks
5. 2000: BowieNet Version 2 and its Karma System
6. 2003: BowieNet Version 3, a Flash Reality
7. After BowieNet, David Bowie Goes Dark and Shuns Social Media