The Best of Bowie

David Bowie comes to town this week, and Ed Masley has a pretty good preview.

But the P-G dropped the ball by omitting Bowie's most impressive accomplishments: leveraging his career, and ownership of his catalog, into an extraordinary financial and entertainment empire. It's not just that the guy has turned out an impressive body of music; it's that much earlier than most rock 'n' roll musicians, he figured out how to make himself a cash machine. He keeps the cash. And all this before the dawn of file sharing.

Another David B with a techno/art take on music--David Byrne--was in town the other day. One of my colleagues was on his way out the office door to go to the concert. A Pitt student who works in our building overhead my asking my colleague where he was headed. The student's reaction was: "Who?" He'd never heard of Talking Heads.

But the student knew (knows) Bowie. It's the business angle that makes Bowie a long-term play: technology, art, and business.