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Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996

Online music retail was thriving by 1996, thanks to sites like Music Boulevard and CDnow. But music downloads and streaming was more of a challenge — as David Bowie discovered in September 1996.

Kearby, who had previously worked as an audio technician for bands like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, wanted to create an online distribution technology that included copyright protection features. So Bowie viewed the “Telling Lies” download as an experiment — another in a long line of boundary-pushing moments in his career — but he was happy to leave the finer details to his technical crew, N2K and Liquid Audio. In the 21 September, 1996 edition of Billboard, in its regular digital section awkwardly named “The Enter*Active File,” Bowie admitted that the online single wasn’t his idea.

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