If you weed through that chat, you end up with just two short mentions of what would mark a momentous moment for the music industry (of the three “Bowies” on the chat, No. You be the judge: who’s ‘Telling Lies’?” It really wasn’t much different from a Reddit AMA. Bowie himself debuted the track on a live online chat on, again, CompuServe, where a moderator noted that “Joining us tonight we have three David Bowie’s. Two years before Bowie, Aerosmith released “Head First,” an unused track from their Get a Grip sessions, as a free WAV download on CompuServe, which might be the most 1994 sentence ever.īut the “Telling Lies” single represented a conscious effort by a major music label to appeal to a growing legion of web users who, surprise, really liked music. Let’s be clear: in 1996, you could find music on the Internet, although there weren’t any mainstream streaming or peer-to-peer sites, and iTunes was nearly five years away. Never are the songs broken open by a new form they are fairly conventional Bowie songs with fancy production.” As AllMusic noted at the time about Earthling, the album from which “Lies” served as the first single, “The record frequently sounds as if the beats were simply grafted on top of pre-existing songs. It’s dark and maybe reflects the singer’s time spent touring as a co-headliner with Nine Inch Nails earlier that year. On September 11th, 1996, Bowie’s “Telling Lies” became the first ever downloadable single by a major artist, arriving on Bowie’s website in three different formats, released over three weeks (a traditional single was later released in November).Īs a song, “Telling Lies” is … well, it’s pretty generic drum ‘n’ bass with some brooding Bowie lyrics (“swear to me in times of war and stress”) and no real hook. If the music industry was going to undergo a tumultuous shift, it might as well have had David Bowie providing the soundtrack. “I am the future / I’m tomorrow / I am the end.” - David Bowie, “Telling Lies”
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