Credit: Far Out / Aerosmith
Thu 13 August 2026 1:00, UK
It’s September 9th, 2014, and you open up your iPhone 5, tapping your foot as the clunky home screen loads to get some tunes spinning, so you open your iTunes account to sift through the small amount of rock music you own, and there it is, U2’s Songs of Innocence.
Out of the blue, the album was taking up precious device storage, whether you wanted it or knew who U2 was. We often cite this as one of the first times music marketing and internet culture fused after Apple and the band teamed up to ‘gift’ the full-length album to the devices of 500 million iTunes account holders. Though they were expecting gratitude, instead, they were met with annoyance.
However, cast your mind way back before the turn of the century, and you’d find countless instances that were similar to, though never as brash as U2’s unwanted arrival to the party, where, as late as 1994, there were a few places you could access, stream, or download music via the internet. What would a world without Spotify look like? A whole lot less corrupt, probably.
Still, in June 1994, the music world was slowly turning its head towards Geffen Records, as three new employees tried to brainstorm a new way of music dissemination: via the internet. The project, helmed by Jim Griffin, Robert von Goeben, and Luke Wood, saw the record company partner with CompuServe, the first commercial online service, which had boasted early formations of email, tech support, and gaming in the mid 1980s.
After all the red lines and digital tape, accessing a song to download via CompuServe was relatively straightforward: Users had to log into their network and type the command ‘GO AEROSMITH’ to access a 4.3-megabyte WAV audio file, completely free of charge. Aerosmith had waived their royalties for the digital experiment.
Today, we’re likely to groan and kick up a fuss if a Facebook tag from your mother takes longer than four seconds to open, but back then, dial-up modem speeds meant that the three-minute and 14-second song took between 60 and 90 minutes of computational processing to download. Hold on long enough, and you’d find the Aerosmith track ‘Head First’ downloaded to your device. Notably, the track was an outtake from the 1993 Get a Grip recording sessions, and worked well for Geffen’s master plan because of its shorter file size.
The experiment would help shape the internet as we know it; roughly 10,000 fans successfully downloaded the outtake in the first eight days. Ca-ching, went the computers at Geffen Records. “If our fans are out there driving down that information superhighway,” said Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler as the experiment proved successful, “Then we want to be playing at the truck stop”.
Further reading: From The Vault
Geffen’s Wood looked back on the partnership some weeks later and praised the band for their commitment to fostering processes of the future: “They had a great attitude and a desire to push the business, and they showed no fear,” he said, “Giving us an unreleased song from an album that huge shows you they were committed.”
He added elsewhere, “We did it because it can be done, and is cool and is fun”. At least it went better than the U2 experiment.
