David Bowie was that rare kind of rock star: You didn’t have to like his music to admire him. Bowie was a business visionary like the ones who shaped Silicon Valley who just didn’t see the point of building companies: He was his own greatest product.
Bowie, born David Jones, died Sunday at age 69, a bohemian who had amassed a vast fortune thanks in part to his many instinctive firsts. Cataloging them would probably be a futile exercise, but some are worth recalling in the same spirit as his fans now play his songs to remember him.
Bowie’s decision to get into rock music was the result of a conscious search for a way to blend business and creativity. Here’s how he described it in a BBC interview:
“I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend. I didn’t want to be a trend, I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new ideas and new perspectives.
That explains Bowie’s constant invention of new stage personae, but not his ability always to stay a little ahead of the curve.
In 1973, he killed off Ziggy Stardust, perhaps the most elaborate of his stage images; 29 years later, just as the rock-n-roll memorabilia boom was about to take off, he auctioned off the so-called “Woodland Creature” costume, also known as the Rabbit Suit — a Kansai Yamamoto hand-painted leather leotard he’d worn onstage during the Stardust tour. It ended up in the hands of Kate Moss, and it actually fit her: She wore it to receive an award on Bowie’s behalf in 2014.
The entity that arranged the auction was Bowienet, which Bowie started through his company, Ultrastar, in 1998, to “create an environment where not just my fans, but all music fans could be part of a single environment where vast archives of music and information could be accessed, views stated and ideas exchanged,” he said. For $19.99 a month, the site would become the Internet service provider for subscribers, providing 20 megabytes to build their own homepages, a “yourname@davidbowie.com” email address, as well as exclusive music and interviews. A cheaper $5.95 option was available to those who didn’t want to change their existing ISP.
The ISP angle was typical for the era but, in essence, Bowie was offering his fans a proto-social network four years before Friendster and five years before MySpace. That wasn’t the first tech innovation Bowie the trendsetter may have foreseen. He may well have had the idea for a universal all-you-can-eat music service — a so-called celestial jukebox — years before Napster, Spotify or Pandora got started.
Now, of course, many musicians don’t see the point of working with big record labels. An increasing amount of music is self-produced and self-distributed or released by small-niche firms that are more social clubs than revenue machines. Their lifestyle is often modeled on Bowie’s Berlin period; in 1976, long before hipster culture even emerged, he moved to an anonymous area of Schoeneberg, lived on the cheap and made atmospheric, low-energy music heavy on electronics.
Around the same time, Bowie moved his tax residence to Switzerland. In 1997, when securitization was limited to relatively standard assets such as mortgages and car loans, “rock-n-roll banker” David Pullman persuaded the singer to securitize future revenues from his catalogue.
Bowie needed the deal to buy back rights to his songs from a former manager who had taken advantage of him while the rock star was more interested in cocaine than finance. The securitized royalties came to be known as Bowie bonds (Pullman even registered that as a trademark, hoping to build a line of business in such instruments). In effect, Bowie sold his future revenues from 287 songs to Prudential Insurance, offering 7.9 percent interest (1.53 percentage points higher than 10-year U.S. Treasurys paid at the time) on the $55 million he received.
Bowie’s fans love him for other reasons, of course, but the near-supernatural business insights were products of the same brain that produced “Space Oddity” and “Heroes.” It’s no accident that Bowie, who rejected the vast majority of movie parts that were offered to him, agreed to play Nikola Tesla, the great innovator whose heritage was fully appreciated only after his death, in the 2006 movie “The Prestige.” He could see the future more clearly than most people.
Bowie once said he couldn’t imagine being remembered in 1,000 years. It’s hard to say if he was right about that, but it’s the kind of long-term thinking of which few others are capable.
Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer. Mark Gilbert, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board.