‘The internet is an alien life form’: how David Bowie created a market for digital music

Bowie’s 1999 album Hours… was the first to go on sale online before hitting regular stores – and his experimentation caused horror in the music industryIt is far from his best album, and not even his best album of the 1990s, but Hours... is David Bowie’s most significant album that decade. Not because of the music, however, but how it was released: the first album by a major artist on a major label to emerge as a download before it arrived physically.Writing about the al