BowieNet

» see davidbowie.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

BowieNet was an American and British product at the billing layer, which is the layer that decides who gets to have things. It launched on 1 September 1998, the same autumn I first got online in Turkey on a 33.6k modem, and it would not have mattered how much I wanted it. You could not buy a dial-up account from another country. The whole product was a local phone number.

That is the part people forget about ISPs now. Bowie did not license his name to a website. He put out an actual internet service, built with UltraStar and Concentric Network, at $19.95 a month in the States and ten pounds in Britain. You dialed a number, you got a connection, and the connection happened to belong to David Bowie.

What came with it was the interesting half. An email address at davidbowie.com with your own name in front of it, plus five megabytes of web space to build a page on. Exclusive audio and video that went nowhere else. Chat rooms that ran constantly, and a 3D avatar world called BowieWorld that was ambitious in the way 1998 3D was always ambitious. If you did not want the dial-up you could pay $5.95 a month for the site alone.

Subscribers reached something around a hundred thousand. Guinness eventually logged it as the first artist-created internet service provider, which is the sort of record that exists because only one person ever tried.

~ the case file ~

~ what you actually got ~

Bowie used it himself, which is the detail that separates this from every other celebrity web venture of the period. He posted photographs and journal entries and turned up in the chat rooms under handles including Sailor, an anagram of Isolar. Members were talking to him, or at least to somebody who kept insisting he was him, and in 1998 that was an unheard of arrangement between an artist at that altitude and his audience.

In 1999 he ran a songwriting competition through the site. More than eighty thousand people submitted lyrics. The winner, Alex Grant, ended up with a co-write on What's Really Happening, which went onto the hours album as a real track on a real major label release. A live album called LiveAndWell.com went out to subscribers only and stayed a members-only object until 2021.

~ the strange part ~

In January 2000 the same operation launched BowieBanc, an online bank with checks and debit cards carrying his face on them. It was USABancShares with a Bowie front end. Bowie put up no capital and carried no exposure. He was paid for the name.

It had about fifteen hundred depositors by the middle of that year and the bank behind it lost close to ten million dollars. By March 2001 the parent had signed an agreement with the Federal Reserve to correct violations found in an inspection. A rock musician's branded checking account is where the late 1990s idea that a fanbase is a distribution channel finally hit something regulated.

~ the day it died ~

Nothing killed BowieNet. Broadband did what broadband did to every dial-up provider between 2002 and 2006. Once people had cable or DSL through a company they did not choose for emotional reasons, the access half of the product was worth nothing, and the community half had been quietly absorbed by message boards that cost nobody twenty dollars a month.

It stopped operating in 2006. There was no announcement at the time and no shutdown notice anybody preserved. The fact that it had ended was not stated publicly until 2012, six years after the servers were already gone, which is a fairly precise measure of how much of it was left by then. davidbowie.com stayed up. The internet service provider underneath it had already been dead for years.

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