The seeds of the Internet were first sown in the late 1960s, with computers laced together in continent-spanning networks to aid in national defence. However, it was in the late 1990s that the end-user explosion took place, as everyday people flocked online in droves.
Many astute individuals saw the potential at the time, and rushed to establish their own ISPs to capitalize on the burgeoning market. Amongst them was a famous figure of some repute. David Bowie might have been best known for his cast of rock-and-roll characters and number one singles, but he was also an internet entrepreneur who got in on the ground floor—with BowieNet.
Is There Dialup On Mars?
Bowie’s obsession with the Internet started early. He was well ahead of the curve of many of his contemporaries, becoming the first major artist to release a song online. Telling Lies was released as a downloadable track, which sold over 300,000 downloads, all the way back in 1996. A year later, the Earthling concert would be “cybercast” online, in an era when most home internet connections could barely handle streaming audio.
These moves were groundbreaking, at the time, but also exactly what you might expect of a major artist trying to reach fans with their music. However, Bowie’s interests in the Internet lay deeper than mere music distribution. He wanted a richer piece of the action, and his own ISP—BowieNet— was the answer.
Bowie tapped some experts for help, enlisting Robert Goodale and Ron Roy in his nascent effort. The service first launched in the US, on September 1st 1998, starting at a price of $19.95 a month. The UK soon followed at a price of £10.00. Users were granted a somewhat awkward email address of username@davidbowie.com, along with 5MB of personal web hosting. Connectivity was provided in partnership with established network companies, with Concentric Network Corp effectively offering a turnkey ISP service, and UltraStar handling the business and marketing side of things. It was, for a time, also possible to gain a free subscription by signing up for a BowieBanc credit card, a branded front end for a banking services run by USABancShares.com. At its peak, the service reached a total of 100,000 subscribers.
Bonuses included access to a network of chatrooms. The man himself was a user of the service, regularly popping into live chats, both scheduled and casually. He’d often wind up answering a deluge of fan questions on topics like upcoming albums and whether or not he drank tea. The operation was part ISP, part Bowie content farm, with users also able to access audio and video clips from Bowie himself. BowieNet subscribers were able to access exclusive tracks from the Earthling tour live album, LiveAndWell.com, gained early access to tickets, and could explore BowieWorld, a 3D interactive city environment. To some controversy, users of other ISPs had to stump up a $5.95 fee to access content on davidbowie.com, which drew some criticism at the time.
Bowienet relied heavily on the leading Internet technologies of the time. Audio and graphics were provided via RealAudio and Flash, standards that are unbelievably janky compared to those in common use today. A 56K modem was recommended for users wishing to make the most of the content on offer. New features were continually added to the service; Christmas 2004 saw users invited to send “BowieNet E-Cards,” and the same month saw the launch of BowieNet blogs for subscribers, too.
Bowie spoke to the BBC in 1999 about his belief in the power of the Internet.
BowieNet didn’t last forever. The full-package experience was, realistically, more than people expected even from one of the world’s biggest musicians. In May 2006, the ISP was quietly shutdown, with the BowieNet web presence slimmed down to a website and fanclub style experience. In 2012, this too came to an end, and DavidBowie.com was retooled to a more typical artist website of the modern era.
Ultimately, BowieNet was an interesting experiment in the burgeoning days of the consumer-focused Internet. The most appealing features of the service were really more about delivering exclusive content and providing a connection between fans and the artist himself. It eventually became clear that Bowie didn’t need to be branding the internet connection itself to provide that.
Still, we can dream of other artists getting involved in the utilities game, just for fun. Gagaphone would have been a slam dunk back in 2009. One suspects DojaGas perhaps wouldn’t have the same instant market penetration without some kind of hit single about clean burning fuels. Speculate freely in the comments.
♫Bowie’s in space. Whatcha doin’ up there, man?♫
Timothy Leary was also a big proponent of the Internet. Thought it would be bigger than acid. “turn on, boot up, jack in.” Curiously referred to it as ‘the screen’.
He was enamored with the early internet and predicted it would bring upheaval in communication and media. He also points towards a vague transhumanist notion of reality becoming fundamentally altered by digital mediums, which is a little hyperbolistic.
The bowienet community was a great one to be a part of – and that tingle when you saw Sailor was online was always palpable. Yet the urge to play it cool abd mundane always made for more interesting chats with him (like the time he had had teeth extracted, and exchanges about him needing to borrow Alexandria’s dummy, to chortles from the Brits and bemused virtual glances from the Americans) pretty much summed up the chat space when he dropped in
Also you have to factor in the BowieWorld experiment, and prior to that Omicron (The Nomad Soul), all in the same era as 1.Outside, to get that feel of his mindset on this whole space
I found Omicron really engaging, if janky, and it got me into virtual environment creation. Funny enough, even without Bowie’s world virtual chat rooms with distance and room based audio were working more or less fine by the late 90’s, albeit with limited detail. Remember, Internet radio was already booming.
We would frequent a first person 3D “art gallery” (unidentifiably blurred on the walls) filled with sprite avatars and have realtime conversations with people in Hong Kong, Australia, China, Canada the US, save occasionally France and Germany without any real trouble on 56k. Time zones were, as they are now, the real gatekeeper.
These were not paid services, or an ISP. They were mostly VRML over http, sometimes with their own client, a modified VRML renderer (software by default) and cached assets. Load time and Render overhead was kept down via aggressive rate limiting, culled visibility and the use of VRML primitives for everything (should ring bells for SL knowers). This system could have trivially crashed the server running it even without bad actors after all. Navigation was laggy and unfun, but conversation was the point, and that worked perfectly. Users were expected to share a side channel, MSN/ICQ/QQ/etc. instead of any other integrated service.
I was very disappointed when these died and there was essentially no interest in building on these things for many years. Even VRML was essentially left to rot despite showing promise with even limited resources and NASA putting some work into making it possible to visualize some data in it. Ultimately end users making 3D models were the only ones who cared, and they didn’t have a platform.
Back in the days of curl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_(programming_language)
Of course, wanting to say something about curl? (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, lol.
Curl’s markup was pretty useful for this kind of thing, for obvious reasons.
It astounds me, that nearly 30 years after my first 3D-via-telecom experiences – being able to move things around in 3D among friends – here we are in 2025, & the only 3D web environments I can find that run on Android & iOS & desktop devices without install, are super-basic janky Roblox/Minecraft mods/knockoffs, with not a single one allowing worthwhile crossplay for TTRPG 3D mapping etc. Every one is tied to a platform or service that doesn’t work for half my friends/devices. Sharing simple 3D spaces shouldn’t be this hard?
I really wanted access to this, but no sadly. Bowie’s interest in the future of the technology and willingness to pursue it was one of the beacons of the time for me.
After Bowienet, the best musician-branded communications service had to be the Dethphone platform from Metalocalypse. They started out extra-awful in order to maximize their brutalness, but eventually evolved into a decent branded smartphone.
Still have and use my @davidbowie.com email, I pray it never disappears 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻
oh, cool… That first screenshot totally looks like it was designed by Designers Republic. (They also did the design for WipeOut for the PSX)
I just want to say that when I was 15-17 I built exclusively Flash websites. I made things like a fully animated zombie grave scene for a friends rap group. On the artist page you would click on their picture and their head would explode and you would zoom in to the brain matter to display their artist information. I didn’t know how to code barely anything back then and it worked flawlessly.
Now you need a dang phd just to get a stick to do a flat 360. Half the time it doesn’t work right, and browsers get things confused. That never happened with Flash because you always had to have the shockwave driver, a single source to display with. It was consistent. I can write algorithms now and I hate modern day web animating. It’s not fun anymore, and worse yet no one even likes animated websites anymore because they are lame and boring people.
Bring. Flash. Back.
You ask to “Bring.Flash.Back.” and I am Flash Gordon. I have a music video for one of my songs that I need an animated 29 seconds which my filmographer’s daughter started four years ago. Could you help me finish it for an affordable price? Please tell me how we can get in touch.
Thanks.