The day Aerosmith changed the internet as we know it

There was no streaming in 1994, Spotify, Itunes, nothing like that, iPods and digital currency nada, just not there yet.
What was around you may ask on this deserted landscape that we would call the internet?

The Internet Underground Music Archive which was in Santa Cruz California. It was supposed to give underground bands a platform from which they could promote their music, you know kind of like Garageband.com today. MP3 will not launch until 1997 so people were still dealing with Columbia House and get 15 CD’s for free type stuff, who can honestly say they don’t still owe them money?

About the only real progress with streaming at the time came in the shape of some computer engineers who formed a band called Severe Tire Damage and they did a live online show use some experimental network designed for streaming media.

The music industry was sitting fine in their big buildings thinking the internet was only a fad and would soon fade away like the 8 Track tape. Well not everyone but they were in no hurry to make any fundamental changes to the system that had worked for them for ages.

Then Geffen Records came along, Jim Griffin was the CTO and is credited with creating the world's first corporate intranet a true digital pioneer.

On June 27th, 1994, the company made “Head First” an unreleased track from Aerosmith’s “Get a Grip” sessions available to download to the two million customers of CompuServe one of the first ISP’s in America.

They would type GO AEROSMITH in the command line and be able to download a 4.3MB WAV file of the song, back then it would have taken up to 90 minutes to download but about 10,000 people did just that in the two-week period the song was available.

Steven Tyler said that if our fans are out there driving down that information superhighway, then we want to be playing at the truck stop”.

The New York Times recognized both the significance of the event as well as the problems the new technology would usher in, stating that the very future of the record business was at stake leaving manufacturers, and retailers out in the cold.

Of course, the big boys laughed and waved at what they thought were the insignificant people below them.

Well, I don’t know if that happened, but you can sort of picture it in your head.

The technology was in its infancy but it didn’t take long for that to change, I mean look at us now, it seems like everything is becoming streaming in today’s age, the movies and tv that we watch, the music that we listen to, everything is nicely and digitally delivered right to whatever device we need it to be on.

Makes you wonder what will come next.

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