Back in 1994, there weren’t many places to stream or download music on the Internet. No Spotify, no iTunes, no Tidal, no Apple Music. No discussions about digital payments, no iPods, no unlimited musical buffets.
IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive, was launched last year in Santa Cruz, California. It gave unsigned and underground bands a platform to promote their music, but that was it. MP3.com wasn’t launched until 1997 and Vitaminic, a pan-European network of local language MP3 sites headquartered in Italy, didn’t go online until 1999.
Things changed slowly. In June 1993, Severe Tire Damage, a Palo Alto, CA garage tire. – composed of computer engineers from Digital Equipment Corp., Xerox, Apple and Sun Microsystems – performed the first-ever live online show with Mbone, an early experimental network designed for streaming media. Music lovers as far as Australia listened in.
The big labels still kept the internet at bay, but people are paying close attention at Geffen, where CTO Jim Griffin – the founder of the world’s first corporate intranet – was a true digital pioneer. And on June 27, 1994, the company made… head first, an unreleased one following of Aerosmith‘s get a grip sessions, available for download to the two million customers of CompuServe, one of America’s first major ISPs.
CompuServe customers could type the words “GO AEROSMITH” into the command line (this was at a time when early web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape were still relatively rare), and download a 4.3 MB WAV file of the song (there was also a mono version, which took up half the storage space).
Given the bandwidth available at that time, head first could take up to 90 minutes to download, but about 10,000 people did just that in the two-week period the song was available.
“When our fans drive down that information highway,” said Aerosmith vocalist Steven Tyler, “we want to play at the truck stop.”
The next week, an article in the New York Times (opens in new tab) Recognizing both the importance of the event and the problems the new technology would pose, writing, “There may be nothing less at stake than the future of the record business. If songs are available for free over a computer’s phone line , this leaves the record behind labels, manufacturers and retailers in the cold.
“The current state of technology makes it impractical in terms of time and computer storage to download an entire CD, but several computer companies are working to remedy this.”
Luke Wood van Geffen, one of the contributors who brought a digital culture to the company, had the arrogant approach common to many Silicon Valley pioneers.
“We did it because we can and it’s cool and fun,” he said, although he did add, “but also to show that there are other things, like how do you collect copyrights?” Cue Napster, and everything that followed.
Aerosmith had written their own web history along with other digital pioneers such as Megadeth – who launched the first band website in October 1994 – and the rolling stoneswho the following year became the first major band to stream a live set over the internet.
†[Jim] Griffin saw exactly where it was going”, Robert von Goeben. van Geffen told Shame magazine in 2014. “Only a few of us saw it as a glimpse into the future.”