Author: Nick

There’s a moment in Spuds MacKenzie’s interview with Dick Clark when Clark shifts gears and, as if by obligation, brings up the recent bad press the bull terrier has been the subject of. “There are these vicious rumors,” he begins, addressing not the tuxedo-wearing Spuds, but one of the beautiful spokesmodels—or “Spudettes”—who accompany him. “Is there any truth to the fact that he is female?” The Spudette, clearly trained for this type of question, asserts, “He’s got three women around him, and I don’t think we’d be following him…” Clark, thrusting his fist forward, interrupts, “He’s a full-out macho guy?” A few men in the audience let out ferocious whoos! and yeahs! They are relieved to hear that their hero is, like them, a cool dude.

Spuds MacKenzie was, in fact, a female dog. Her real name was Honey Tree Evil Eye, and Jackie and Stanley Oles, the humans who owned her, called her “Evie.” This was all revealed in a 1987 People Magazine article that set out to debunk rumors that the bull terrier had died in a limo accident, or while surfing, or in a plane crash. In a stunning breach of privacy, the article also published the Oles’ home address. Soon after the People piece came out, Jackie Oles was sitting with Evie on the stoop of her suburban Chicago house when a reporter confronted her, unannounced. “I don’t talk to reporters,” she said before hurrying inside. Oles was wearing a Spuds MacKenzie sweatshirt at the time.

If, by chance, you don’t know who Spuds MacKenzie is, it’s probably because Budweiser retired him in 1989. Spuds sold beer and—this may be hard to believe—he was one of the most famous living things on the planet. Though he hasn’t been seen in a while, he’s about to make his way back into the spotlight. In honor of his 30th anniversary, Spuds will make an appearance during Super Bowl LI—albeit as a ghost (voiced by Carl Weathers) who is on a mission to teach a man about the spirit of Bud Light. 

(NOTE: I will be using male pronouns for Spuds the character and female pronouns for Honey Tree Evil Eye from this point forward.)

Honey Tree Evil Eye was bred to be a show dog, and the Oles joined Chicago’s Fort Dearborn Bull Terrier Club and coached her for competition. Evie performed relatively well within her breed, but never placed at Silverwood, America’s premier bull terrier event.

At a show in Chicago, Evie caught the attention of DDB Needham. The ad agency was scouting for a dog-centered campaign, and the splotch over Evie’s left eye made her stand out. She was invited for a photo shoot, and soon posters of her as Spuds MacKenzie sitting behind a goblet of Bud Light while wearing a “Delta Omicron Gamma” fraternity sweatshirt began to pop up at college campuses. The premise—cool dog is cool—proved so popular that wholesalers demanded Anheuser-Busch put Spuds on television.

Evie’s demeanor was unusually calm for her breed and she behaved more like a lap cat than a rough-and-tumble terrier. Her breeder told the Bull Terrier Club of Dallas that “she was very mellow and low key. The owners sometimes used a yo-yo in the ring to get her to spark up and show.” She was known to lounge about and munch on Raisin Chex, which was hand-fed to her. Relaxed and undemanding, Evie was a perfect candidate for TV work.

Spuds’ first prime-time TV appearance came during Super Bowl XXI in 1987.

The spot features a narrative arch that would become the go-to formula in the Spuds MacKenzie oeuvre: 1. Spuds shows up at a party. 2. Everyone is thrilled to see Spuds—especially the women.

Robin Leach provides the voiceover, which hammers home the fact that not only is Spuds a cool party dude, but he also is obscenely wealthy. This stolid, fat, rich dog surrounded by adoring models and sycophantic buddies begs to be seen as both a result of and response to the late 1980s—but then you might be missing the gag.

The reaction to the original 1987 ad was enthusiastic, and what followed was a full-on marketing assault and nationwide in-joke that acknowledged, dismissed, winked at, and embraced nearly every advertising cliche.

The key to the campaign’s success, Bill Stolberg tells me, was the fact that they never acknowledged that Spuds was a dog—they would insist he was a man. Stolberg’s name comes up a lot in old press clippings about Spuds’ meteoric rise to fame. He worked for Fleishman Hillard, the PR firm Anheuser-Busch used for the campaign, and Stolberg traveled with Spuds and acted as his brand manager and voice. He recalls, “The first question we’d always get would be, ‘What kind of dog is Spuds?’ To which I replied, ‘He’s not a dog, he’s an executive.'”

As Spuds grew in popularity, so did the beer. According to the New York Times, Spuds helped increase Bud Light’s sales by 20 percent between 1987 and 1988. Serious business journalists began contacting Stolberg for insight on the campaign and its star dog, but he wouldn’t break character. Stolberg would insist that Spuds was a human man—a Senior Party Consultant, to be specific—and that he was so cool he didn’t have to speak verbally. “It would drive them crazy,” he says.

The hallmark of late-’80s advertising was overt self-awareness. Audiences were wise to BS—or at least marketers decided audiences should be hip to it—so commercials and spokespeople were done as parody. It’s why Coca-Cola used Max Headroom, a satirical version of a super-slick television host doomed to live inside a computer, and why Isuzu had Joe Isuzu, a pathological liar of a spokesman whose audacious claims would be corrected by on-screen text overlaid during his ads. The pervading idea was that you’re in on the joke too, friend. We know you’re smart—doesn’t that feel good?

Spuds MacKenzie fits into this category, but the joke was twisted and pushed far beyond the restrictions of TV. When he went on tour, whether to appear on Good Morning America or to throw out the first pitch at a National League playoff game, his marketing team would go to extremes to perpetuate the Spuds MacKenzie mythos. “We’d put him in limos and rent him his own hotel rooms,” says Stolberg. “He would be dressed in a tuxedo and walk through the airport with the Spudettes. People would see him, and that’s how it would grow.”

The death rumors were a sign that Spuds had truly made it. Stolberg recalls showing up at his office to find a stack of missed-call slips an inch thick, all from people who were trying to get in touch to see if the spokesdog really did die in that limo crash or via hot tub electrocution while soaking with the Spudettes.

The Spudettes were key to this success, and the troupe made up of models and aspiring actresses became a cultural phenomenon in their own right. In fact, Sir Mix-A-Lot says he wrote “Baby Got Back” as a response to “the Spuds MacKenzie girls, little skinny chicks looking like stop signs, with big hair and skinny bodies.”

If Spuds was a gag on the cliched spokesman, then the Spudettes riffed on the idea that “sex sells.” The benefit of presenting the latter as a joke is that it still does the job as well as its more sincere analog. Posters of Spuds and the Spudettes were the most popular pin-ups in the country, “easily outdistanc[ing] TV’s ‘Alf,’ No. 2 in the poster market,” reported the Los Angeles Times, which also called Spuds “the Nation’s Most Unlikely Sex Symbol.”

Pretending that a dog was a human man who loved—and was loved—by women seems like it would present some problems, and when I asked Stolberg if he was ever worried about this, he insisted that the idea was ridiculous. “You’d have to be pretty bizarre to think anything like that.” 

While everything about Spuds MacKenzie was a joke, the dichotomy of people who wanted to get it and those who didn’t defined and caused much of Spuds’ success. While Morning Zoo DJs and targeted consumers laughed at and championed the idea of an expressionless lump of a dog who drove women wild, reporters saw him as the origins of a market-driven phenomenon that, given the time period, must have been of great importance. It’s why People magazine talked to both a Chicago account executive and a UC Berkeley “urban humor expert” in that scoop about the party dog’s real gender that featured the Oles’ full home address.

“It was kind of nuts,” Stolberg says. “[The Oles] were totally unprepared for all that silliness, but they were good sports about it.” Jackie Oles would travel with Spuds wherever he went, and one can only imagine what she thought as she sat in the green room and watched David Letterman interview her dog.

In “Spuds Is A Dud As A Party Guy—He’s A Girl,” the Chicago Tribune‘s follow-up to the People piece, Illinois State Senator Judy Baar Topinka said of the Oles, “The family has tried to be really low profile.” Topinka had tried to pass a resolution in the Senate honoring her district as the home of Spuds MacKenzie. Anheuser-Busch protested the resolution and it was eventually pulled, but this wouldn’t be the last time lawmakers discussed Spuds MacKenzie.

Less than a year after Spuds’ national TV debut, Strom Thurmond stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate chamber and waved a stuffed Spuds MacKenzie doll. He accused Anheuser-Busch of using the mascot to sell alcohol to underage drinkers, saying, ”I am not confident in the voluntary efforts of the alcohol beverage industry to increase public awareness of the hazards of alcohol abuse with 12-year-olds drinking wine coolers and wearing Spuds MacKenzie T-shirts.” He made his case while standing in front of huge posters featuring the “Ayatollah of Partyollah” himself, Spuds MacKenzie.

A month later, Ohio stores pulled all Bud Light cartons that featured images of Spuds MacKenzie dressed up as Santa due to a law that prohibited St. Nick from being used to sell alcohol. Across the country, schools were banning students from wearing popular Spuds MacKenzie gear.

In response to all this, Anheuser-Busch eventually switched its $50 million Spuds MacKenzie campaign from Bud Light to a responsible drinking initiative. This is why Super Bowl XXIII’s 15-second spot features Spuds playing guitar with no beer in sight, along with the tagline: “Know When to Say When.” One year prior, Super Bowl XXII featured an ad where MacKenzie wins an Olympic Gold Medal in hockey and shares an ice cold Bud Light with a gorgeous Russian woman.

Spuds’ TV appearances became fewer and fewer as the decade neared its end. “A really good campaign doesn’t last much longer than 18 months,” Stolberg says, “The joke gets old.” Spuds lives on through the over 200 officially licensed items of Spuds merchandise (as well as the knock-off party animal gear that was once sold on street corners and at beach resorts like Phendi handbags) that you can buy on eBay. 

“You’ll still sometimes see those plastic Spuds MacKenzie signs in bars,” Bill Stolberg says, marveling at how long it has been. He left Fleishman Hillard in 1995 to start his own consulting firm, which he still runs. I ask him what Spuds MacKenzie was really like, if he was always as calm as he seemed in the commercials. “Ah ah ah,” he interrupts, “Mr. MacKenzie is not a dog.”

Honey Tree Evil Eye died of kidney failure at the age of 10 in 1993—she had an average lifespan for a healthy English bull terrier. Her death was reported at the time with the headline “Spuds MacKenzie Really Dead This Time.” Unlike the actors who played Max Headroom and Joe Isuzu, Evie didn’t need to worry about what she would do with her career once the ad work dried up. It is understood that she spent her retirement lounging with her family and eating Raisin Chex.

This article originally ran in 2014.

On June 13, 1966, in Miranda v. Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled that, in order for confessions and other information obtained while a suspect is in custody to be admissible in court, police had to first give a run-through of a few key aspects of the judicial system—starting, as any Law and Order fan knows, with the right to remain silent. In the 50 years since, the Court has codified several times just when and how a suspect should be Mirandized. (Yes, it’s a verb.) Here are 10 facts about Miranda rights.

1. NOT BEING READ HIS RIGHTS DIDN’T ALLOW MIRANDA TO GO FREE.

The Miranda in Miranda v. Arizona is Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a Phoenix man who had amassed a long rap sheet—including attempted rape, assault, and burglary—by his early 20s. In 1963, Phoenix Police arrested him for robbery and rape after a car believed to be involved was traced back to him. In the lineup, two victims thought he looked right, but neither was positive. A pair of officers questioned him for two hours in an interrogation room, emerging with a signed confession.

At the trial, Miranda’s defense attorney, Alvin Moore, tried to have the confession thrown out, arguing that Miranda, who hadn’t advanced beyond the ninth grade, was not properly made aware of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Miranda was convicted. His lawyer appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction. The case caught the attention of Robert J. Corcoran, an attorney at the Phoenix branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped take it to the U.S. Supreme Court

In a 5-4 decision, the Court reversed Miranda’s conviction. “[W]e hold that, when an individual is taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom by the authorities in any significant way and is subjected to questioning, the privilege against self-incrimination is jeopardized,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. “Procedural safeguards must be employed to protect the privilege.” The Court ruled that certain Fifth and Sixth Amendment safeguards were meaningless unless suspects like Miranda understood them during interrogation, given the enormous power possessed by police in such a situation.

But Miranda didn’t walk free, and the state of Arizona retried him. Even without the confession, the jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to 20 to 30 years. (Failure to give a Miranda warning doesn’t free a suspect on a technicality; it only means information obtained during post-arrest interrogation can’t be used in court.)

In 1971, Miranda was paroled; four years later, he returned to prison on a parole violation and was released again soon after. On January 31, 1976, he was fatally stabbed in a bar fight. Though no one was ever charged with or convicted of the murder, police did briefly detain a suspect. He was read his Miranda rights.

2. THE SCRIPT CAME FROM A CALIFORNIA DISTRICT ATTORNEY WITH A PRINTING BUSINESS.

While the Supreme Court gave a list of the rights individuals must be informed of, they didn’t come up with an exact script. That came from a meeting of California’s district attorneys held weeks after the decision. Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch appointed Assistant Attorney General Doris H. Maier and Nevada County District Attorney Harold Berliner to compose a short, easy-to-memorize script that relayed the essential rights stipulated in the court decision. It consisted of fewer than 100 words, including four statements and two questions:

You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
You have the right to talk to a lawyer and have him present with you while you are being questioned.
If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you before any questioning, if you wish one.
Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you?
Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to us now?

Berliner had a side business in letterpress printing. He printed the Miranda warning on easy-to-carry vinyl cards (able to withstand a washing machine cycle in the pocket of a police uniform) and sent samples to law enforcement agencies across the country. He sold tens of thousands of the cards, popularizing the classic script familiar to criminals and TV viewers. Berliner would later say that he regretted adding “and will” to the warning, because “[i]t is not an exact statement of the truth of the situation” since not everything said will definitely be used against the suspect. But he liked how the sentence flowed.

3. THE SCRIPT WAS FURTHER POPULARIZED ON DRAGNET.

A stickler for procedural accuracy, actor/producer Jim Webb inserted the California-phrased Miranda warning into the NBC show upon its 1967 revival, reinforcing that wording as the standard.

4. SOME BORDER STATES ADD A LINE.

States along the U.S.-Mexico border add a line: “If you are not a United States citizen, you may contact your country’s consulate prior to any questioning.”

5. THERE IS A PUBLIC SAFETY EXEMPTION.

In New York v. Quarles (1984), the Court carved out a public “safety exemption” for situations “in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety.”

This case stemmed from an incident that occurred in Queens in 1980. NYPD officer Frank Kraft darted into a grocery store to chase down a suspect. He had been forewarned the suspect, later identified as Benjamin Quarles, was armed. After Quarles surrendered, Kraft found an empty holster while doing a pat-down. “Where’s the gun?” he asked. Quarles gestured toward some empty milk cartons and said, “The gun is over there.” Police retrieved a loaded handgun. After that, an officer read Quarles the Miranda warning.

The State of New York charged Quarles with criminal possession of a weapon, among other crimes. The State exempted statements made pre-Miranda warning (as well as the gun), but as the case bounced from an appellate court to the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices were cornered into ruling on the matter. Speaking for the majority, future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, “We conclude that the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety”—such as the location of a loaded gun—“outweighs the need for the prophylactic rule protecting the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination.”

The exemption has been utilized in recent terrorism cases. In 2009, the FBI questioned the attempted “Christmas Day bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for nine hours before Mirandizing him. In 2010, Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to ignite a car bomb in Times Square, also spoke to investigators for several hours before being Mirandized. In 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bombing perpetrator, was in custody for 16 hours before he heard the Miranda script.

6. MIRANDA RIGHTS DON’T APPLY TO SIMPLE TRAFFIC STOPS.

Police officers don’t read Miranda rights during traffic stops, even though they do question drivers. In Berkemer v. McCarty (1984)—in which an Ohio man fought his DUI arrest on the grounds that the officer did not Mirandize him during the stop—the Supreme Court ruled that advisement of rights only applied when a suspect was in police custody.

7. MIRANDA RIGHTS DON’T PREVENT UNDERCOVER OFFICERS FROM OBTAINING ADMISSIBLE INFORMATION IN JAILS.

Miranda rights were codified again in 1990 in Illinois v. Perkins, which protected police working undercover.

Four years prior, long-time offender Lloyd Perkins told a fellow inmate, Donald Charlton, about a murder he had committed, but not been charged with. Charlton went to police, who had Officer John Parisi pose as an inmate at a jail in Montgomery County, Illinois. Charlton and his new associate tried to recruit Perkins in an escape plan that would involve killing guards. Undercover, Parisi asked Perkins if he’d ever “done” anyone, and Perkins confessed to the killing of Richard Stephenson in East St. Louis, Illinois in 1984.

Once convicted, Perkins’s attorneys tried to throw out the confession arguing Parisi had never Mirandized him. The Supreme Court made a distinction between police deception and coercion and ruled that a jail doesn’t have the inherently coercive and “police-dominated atmosphere” of an interrogation.

8. THE WARNING APPLIES TO SOME INTERROGATIONS OUTSIDE OF CUSTODY.

In another follow up to the Miranda case, John J. Fellers of Lincoln, Nebraska, impressively appealed his drug conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, without a lawyer, and the Court ruled 9-0 in his favor. After Fellers had been indicted, two police officers stopped by his home and questioned him about his drug problems before taking him to the station, Mirandizing him, and charging him with conspiring to distribute methamphetamine.

In Fellers v. United States (2004), the Court clarified the traditional understanding that Miranda rights began at arrest. Instead, the right to counsel began “at or after the time that judicial proceedings have been initiated.” Because clearly judicial proceedings had begun and the intent of the meeting—regardless of location—was to exact information, Fellers should have been Mirandized as soon as it began.

9. MIRANDA WARNINGS MAY HAVE LOWERED CONFESSION RATES.

Many studies [PDF] have tried to document the impact of Miranda on confessions and crime-solving. The results can be difficult to understand and are often criticized within academia for parsing data one way or another. There is no consensus on Miranda’s impact on convicting suspects, but several studies have pointed to lowered rates of confession and self-incrimination since the decision.

A study of Pittsburgh police data found that 48.5 percent of suspects confessed from 1964 to the Miranda requirement and 32.3 percent did in the months after Miranda. However, researchers found no change in Pittsburgh’s conviction and clearance rates. A study of Miranda’s effects on criminal persecution in Manhattan found that confessions were used in court in 49 percent of felony cases in the six months before Miranda and in only 14.5 percent immediately afterwards. A study of serious crimes prosecuted by the Philadelphia District Attorney found that 90 percent of suspects gave some kind of statement before 1964. As Philadelphia police gradually introduced Fifth and Sixth Amendment warnings into interrogation, even before Miranda, that rate began to drop. By the start of 1967, only 40.7 percent of arrestees for the same crimes gave statements.

10. THE D.O.J.’S GUIDELINES ON MIRANDIZING DEAF SUSPECTS: DON’T; JUST GET A LAWYER.

Department of Justice training material recommends that police not even question Deaf suspects until a lawyer for that person is present because of the Miranda hurdle. Providing a written Miranda warning is ill advised because it assumes the suspect reads at a level to understand it. Lip-reading is also inadequate; only 5 percent of spoken words can be understood through the technique. Agencies might be tempted to bring in a sign language interpreter, but many legal and technical terms are not easily conveyed in sign language. Just wait for a lawyer.

On October 6, 1991, the Chicago Cubs played the last game of a routinely underwhelming regular season. They went 77-83, placed fourth in their division, and missed out on the playoffs. For Cubs fans, it was just a drop in the bucket, another sun-drenched summer of baseball cut short before the postseason.

After the game, beloved Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray didn’t hang his head in disappointment. The eternal optimist, Caray stayed on the air to give fans a pep talk. “Too bad we couldn’t have had a victory that meant a pennant,” he said, “But that will come; sure as God made green apples. Some day the Chicago Cubs are going to be in the World Series.”

Sure enough, just as God made green apples, the Cubs did one better and actually won the World Series last night, ending 108 years of “waiting ’til next year.”

This was the scene this morning at Harry Caray’s grave at All Saints Catholic Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, Illinois. As sure as God made green apples, Cubs fans made sure to leave behind the most appropriate tribute possible:

Holy Cow pic.twitter.com/DmwTPJbMkD

— Mark Schlabach (@Mark_Schlabach) November 3, 2016

Congrats, Harry. You were right.

It’s a given nowadays that one can open a laptop and hear nearly any song ever recorded by any artist. But those who knew the beeps and tones of a dial-up internet connection understand that it wasn’t always this way. Here are eight milestones in the distribution of music online that helped get us to where we are today.

1. FIRST MP3: “TOM’S DINER” BY SUZANNE VEGA // SUMMER 1991

Although he winces at being called the “Father of the MP3,” German electrical engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg has overseen the development of the format since his thesis advisor, Professor Dieter Seitzer, asked Brandenburg for help on his goal of transmitting music files through digital phone lines in the early ’80s. (A patent examiner once told Seitzer, “This is impossible; we can’t patent impossible things.”)

In the late ’80s, Brandenburg was a member of an international organization called the Moving Picture Experts Group, and he was trying to create a compression system for the download and upload of audio files. His team managed to move songs from computer to computer, but Brandenburg worried the transfer wasn’t maintaining all the subtleties of the human voice. So he chose to tweak and eventually perfect the format using a song that would be “a worst case for the system as we had it in 1988”—“Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega. Brandenburg selected the acapella version of the song that opens Vega’s 1987 album Solitude Standing. The first attempted transfer was a complete failure.

According to Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music by Mark Katz, it took several years of collaboration and tinkering to create the final product, the MP3, named after after the Motion Picture Experts Group and the fact that it was the third layer of audio encoding in their new standard. The final digitized version of “Tom’s Diner” was the prototype Brandenburg played for investors in 1991. Twenty-five years later, the MP3 is still the standard for digital music, found on nearly every smart phone, iPod, and personal computer on the planet. “We had an inkling it would have repercussions,” Vega told Spin. “It both freed music and destroyed the industry.”

2. FIRST ALBUM LEAKED ONLINE: SONGS OF FAITH AND DEVOTION BY DEPECHE MODE // 1993

After the success of their 1990 album Violator, Depeche Mode had an army of fans awaiting their next collection of songs. As the band was preparing to release its follow-up in 1993, “a panicked secretary strode into Warner vice president Jeff Gold’s office to deliver an urgent message,” Steve Knopper wrote in Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry. “Depeche Mode’s new Songs of Faith and Devotion CD had just leaked to fans in online chat rooms!” It was the first leak of a major artist’s work on the internet.

Gold did not know what a “chat room” was; he signed up for CompuServe, an early online service provider, to investigate. Like anyone who logged onto the internet for the first time back then, he soon got distracted. Yes, fans were trading officially unreleased Depeche Mode songs in .wav and MP2 formats, straining their dial-up connections for hours, but Gold also noted they were talking incessantly about artists. He became a chat room lurker, and one of the first music executives to engage the internet by doing things like releasing preview song clips and holding fan contests online.

3. FIRST CONCERT BROADCAST ONLINE: SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE // JUNE 24, 1993

The Multicast Backbone, or “Mbone,” was an early cybercast system used mostly to livestream academic conferences. On June 24, 1993, Severe Tire Damage, a hobby band of Palo Alto tech employees, used it to host the first concert streamed online. Calling themselves “the house band of the internet,” their concert space was the patio of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, but they played for an audience of online techies as far away as Australia.

Seventeen months later, the Rolling Stones used Mbone for a 20-minute webcast. By far the most famous band to cybercast up to that point, the Stones’s show made headlines. Because they had access to the same channel, Severe Tire Damage strapped on their instruments and performed a show on Mbone immediately before the Stones broadcast, essentially using their familiarity with the internet to get a coveted spot as the World’s Greatest Rock Band’s opening act.

4. FIRST MAJOR SONG RELEASED ONLINE: “HEAD FIRST” BY AEROSMITH // JUNE 27, 1994

Some tech-savvy Geffen Records employees were looking to do something big on the internet in 1994. They recruited CompuServe to host a free download of a song by one of the label’s perpetual heavy-hitters, Aerosmith. The band became the first major-label act to intentionally release a song online, the three-minute-long “Head First.” The press release included the impeccable Steven Tyler quote, “If our fans are out there driving down that information superhighway, then we want to be playing at the truck stop.”

“Head First” was released exclusively via CompuServe, and the band gave up all rights to the track (an outtake from their 1993 album Get a Grip). Download times were one hour or more, depending on the user’s setup; some users accused Geffen of deliberately making the process unpleasant to undermine the industry-uprooting potential of the internet. Tim Nye, operator of website SonicNet, told The New York Times, “What Geffen is trying to do, quite clearly, is convince the public that the technology isn’t there to make this a viable way of distributing music.”

5. FIRST RADIO STATION TO STREAM ONLINE: WXYC IN CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA // NOVEMBER 7, 1994

In 1994, WXYC FM, the radio station of the University of North Carolina, became the first to run a 24-hour livestream concurrent to its broadcast. SunSITE, a commercially-backed cybercast developer at UNC, helped the campus station get online, using the CU-SeeMe software that had been developed at Cornell University. Because of the state of music copyright laws, SunSITE needed a noncommercial station to test the technology, director Paul Jones told the Associated Press.

The ’94 AP article noted that “People who want to listen can do so by gaining access to the university’s site on the World Wide Web,” which the author specified as “a part of the internet that has become popular because of the development of sound, video and graphical features.” In the first month, users logged in from as far as Mexico and Poland.

6. FIRST MAJOR ALBUMS OFFERED AS PAID DOWNLOADS: MEZZANINE BY MASSIVE ATTACK AND HOURS BY DAVID BOWIE // SEPTEMBER 21, 1999

According to Big Media, Big Money: Cultural Texts and Political Economics by Ronald V. Bettig and Jeanne Lynn Hall, there are two albums that could be considered as the first to be intentionally released in full online, both late-’90s EMI efforts. Before discs of it were shipped in 1998, trip-hop band Massive Attack posted a stream of its acclaimed 1998 album Mezzanine on its website, and David Bowie offered 1999’s Hours (sometimes stylized ‘hours…’) as a digital download for $18 two weeks before it arrived in stores.

In a 1995 MTV News report, Bowie said he wasn’t impressed going online (“I did it one time, a couple of years ago, but I got so tired of the rubbish that I dropped out again”). The musical purveyor of all things futuristic eventually embraced the web, even launching his own provider company BowieNet and running an online contest that allowed a fan to write the lyrics to an Hours track. With the release, Bowie also became the first major artist to sell a full album online. It was available for Liquid Audio or Microsoft Audio 4.0. The New York Times noted that “skeptics have suggested that the album’s title refers to how long the download will take over an average modem.”

7. FIRST ITUNES BESTSELLER: “STUCK IN A MOMENT YOU CAN’T GET OUT OF” BY U2 // APRIL 28, 2003

After years of battling peer-to-peer networks in court, the music industry began offering its catalog legally en masse with Apple’s iTunes on April 28, 2003. Though it’s not known which of the 200,000 songs made available for 99 cents that day was the first ever purchased, at the end of the day, the top-selling was “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” a U2 single from an album released two-and-a-half years prior. (More recently, Apple learned this did not mean everyone with an iTunes account loved U2.) The best-selling full album was Beck’s Sea Change.

8. FIRST MAJOR PAY-WHAT-YOU-WANT INTERNET RELEASE: IN RAINBOWS BY RADIOHEAD // OCTOBER 10, 2007

With 2003’s Hail to the Thief, Radiohead fulfilled its six-album contract with EMI. The convention-defying band released its subsequent album, In Rainbows, online and permitted fans to pay whatever price they volunteered through its website. (Two months later, CD and vinyl copies shipped.)

The press dubbed it a grand experiment with the future of the music business at stake. Initial research showed more than 2 million people downloaded In Rainbows in its first month and that two-thirds of downloaders took it for free. Those who did pay offered up an average of $2.26. Another analysis showed that 40 percent paid for it at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million. Lead singer Thom Yorke says he has kept his own count and the band made more money from In Rainbows than they did off all of their previous albums combined (plenty of that, of course, due to lack of label and retailer overhead).