Was David Bowie the first music influencer?

In 1996, the internet – or World Wide Web as it was referred to then – was still a relatively new space. It was the year Hotmail was launched, making it one of the very first public webmail services. Instant messaging would only be created a year later. It was also the year that rock star David Bowie would approve the development of BowieNet.

BowieNet was not only an official website but also a blog, an interactive online community for fans and even an Internet Service Provider (ISP) – signing up provided fans with both an individual email address and internet access. Its launch in 1998 preceded Google becoming a legal entity by a matter of days and was well before social media.

Now, in the age of TikTok, musicians have to wear the double hat of influencer and artist – some more comfortably than others. Some musicians have made content suggesting their labels are making the creation of a viral video a pre-condition for a song releases.

While it’s TikTok that currently has the power to launch songs to the top of the charts and artists to superstardom, technology and the music industry have had a long relationship.

@florence

The label are begging me for ‘low fi tik toks’ so here you go. pls send help ☠️ x

♬ original sound – Florence

Toni Eagar, a senior lecturer in marketing at The Australian National University (ANU), who describes herself as “a Labyrinth girl”, says the success of David Bowie’s fan site can be mined for lessons on how the internet has impacted the music industry, fan communities and influence.

“He kind of did it first,” Eagar says.

“He was looking at how the internet would change or be useful for music, and he implemented BowieNet as this experimental platform to try and control his own voice and space on the internet.”

A space oddity on the web

At its peak BowieNet had 100,000 subscribers. It was a space where Bowie responded to fans, released exclusive music – Hours was the first album to be sold online ahead of being available in physical stores – and even hosted a fan-submitted songwriting contest.

“Musicians now don’t create those spaces because they don’t need to, they already exist on social platforms,” Eagar says.

“But I remember going on the internet in 1996 and trying to find the bands I like, and none of them had any web presence whatsoever. You know, the bad old days of HTML and badly formatted websites.”

In the 90s, Bowie had an eclectic fanbase – there were fans who loved his appearance in films such as Labyrinth, while others preferred his more alternative musical efforts on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. BowieNet was a pioneering effort to cater to everyone’s different interests.

 “He’s trying to communicate with different audiences, expecting different things from him,” Eagar says. “I interviewed people who were involved in BowieNet, and some liked it for the access to the music, while others liked access to other Bowie fans.

“Although, I had one woman saying she got out of it because she didn’t want to hear about what David Bowie ate for breakfast.”

We can be heroes: performing authenticity

So, what does BowieNet teach us about how modern musicians should connect with audiences?

While some may begrudge promoting themselves on social media, the early success of BowieNet – which only closed in 2012 – proves that having a branded online presence has long been a way to connect with fans. It’s a medium that can complement touring, releasing music and featuring in the media.

“People are all crossing back and forth between your traditional celebrity outlets and social media outlets. It’s no longer this one platform or the other,” Eagar says. “Fans might want to connect with the artist, or they might want to connect with the thing that artist represents.”

Artists worried that they need to pigeonhole themselves into one niche to please their fanbase can also take cues from Bowie’s wide-ranging career.

“Authenticity is a social construction,” Eagar says. “Some might argue the real Bowie is 70s Bowie because all his fans are saying that’s the real him, even though Bowie by then had got himself a blonde dye job, was tanned and married to a supermodel.

“Something is authentic when everyone says it’s authentic.”