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David Bowie - A self-reinventor, in finance and business

Turn and face the strange. Defy the status quo. And market, market, market yourself all the way to death's door. David Bowie did all that, constantly laughing at convention, and (sometimes) all the way to the bank. A great influence in music and fashion, he carried equal weight as a financial innovator. He was an art and business project forever in flux.

Turn and face the strange. Defy the status quo. And market, market, market yourself all the way to death's door. David Bowie did all that, constantly laughing at convention, and (sometimes) all the way to the bank. A great influence in music and fashion, he carried equal weight as a financial innovator. He was an art and business project forever in flux.

Ziggy had a zig for every zag. In the early 1970s, he answered social consciousness with androgyny. Later, when it was hip to diss disco, he embraced it. Even rock bastions like WMMR, WIOQ, and WYSP were forced to play "Young Americans."

And in the early 1980s, when FM rock radio was still considered the cool medium, Bowie gleefully threw himself onto the screen with some of the first music videos to jump-start the MTV revolution - luring new generations of preteen and teen fans into the fold.

All that self-reinvention encouraged him to venture even further into the music business. In the late 1980s, Bowie started playing musical chairs - shifting his catalog from RCA to higher bidder Rykodisc, recording new albums for EMI, and later signing with Sony.

A decade later (1997), Bowie bought into a crazy idea of "securitizing" his future revenue as a songwriter, allowing "rock and roll banker" David Pullman to hawk so-called Bowie Bonds. Prudential Insurance paid $55 million for the bundle, which promised a 7.9 percent interest rate and 10-year maturity. Though the bonds were later downgraded to one notch above junk, Bowie and his backers made out OK, as he started licensing use of the tunes (egads!) to advertisers like Microsoft and Coca-Cola, a then-radical, now commonplace way for artists to market their wares and make new acquaintances.

Spawned in 1998, a year before Napster's debut, Bowienet was yet another radical move by the artist/businessman - a $20-a-month Internet service offering "vast archives of music and information."

Bowienet failed - but Bowie was clearly on to something again, forecasting the crash of the hard-media (CD and vinyl) music business and the rise of free or low-cost streaming services - today's Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, et al.

"The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it," Bowie told the New York Times in 2002. "I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity."

On Sunday, two days after his album Blackstar hit sites and stores, David Bowie sadly lost a well-guarded, 18-month fight against cancer. He might well joke that it was his ultimate career move.

takiffj@phillynews.com

215-854-5960@JTakiff