Before anyone effectively figured out how to sell music on the internet, Aerosmith gave it away. On June 27, 1994, the Boston rock band and their label, Geffen Records, made history by releasing "Head First" as the first song by a major artist available exclusively as a digital download, and the music industry hasn't really been the same ever since.
The vehicle was CompuServe, one of America's first major internet service providers, which counted roughly two million subscribers at the time. Customers could type "GO AEROSMITH" into the CompuServe command line and receive a 4.3MB WAV file of the track, or a smaller mono version for those tight on storage. The song was free, and CompuServe waived its standard $9.60-an-hour connection fees for the duration of the download. Given the modem speeds of the era, that download still took 60 to 90 minutes, and around 10,000 people did exactly that within the first eight days the song was available.
The track itself was a leftover. "Head First" came from Aerosmith's sessions for 1993's Get a Grip and had only appeared previously as a B-side on the European release of "Eat the Rich." Selecting it was partly practical, as Geffen's technology team, led by Chief Technology Officer Jim Griffin, needed a short file. "It was proof of life for digital music," Griffin said years later. The legal questions were immediate and enormous. How would artists, labels, and songwriters get paid in a world of digital files? There was no clear answer in 1994. Griffin himself went from CTO to traveling the world explaining the revolution in digital music distribution.
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Steven Tyler, for his part, seemed more interested in the larger technology of the moment than the paperwork details. "If our fans are out there driving down that information superhighway, then we want to be playing at the truck stop," he said at the time. "This is the future, so let's get it going." Bassist Tom Hamilton took it further, entering CompuServe chat rooms to speak directly with fans and occasionally correct misconceptions about Aerosmith lore.
The music industry around them was far more cautious. Major labels were still treating the internet as a threat to be managed rather than a channel to embrace. Geffen's Luke Wood later described the rationale simply. "We did it because it can be done and is cool and is fun," he said, though he acknowledged the harder question lurking underneath. "How do you collect copyright fees?" Within a few years, Napster would answer that question in a way nobody at Geffen wanted.
Thirty-two years later, the industry that "Head First" helped disrupt generates the vast majority of its revenue from digital streaming. What Aerosmith and Geffen were at the front of with a single WAV file and a 90-minute wait time now plays out billions of times a day, frictionlessly, in pockets around the world.
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