Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes: The first album to truly embrace the internet?
Whether the advent of the internet has made the world more connected or is rapidly sending humanity on a path to a nightmarish AI dystopia is an argument that can and will be waged on for multiple years.
What cannot be disputed, however, is just how impactful the digital revolution has been within the realm of the music industry.
Historically, the music industry has approached new technologies, particularly those advances which are user-focused, with trepidation. Even when the compact cassette hit the world, record companies responded in a completely sane and rational manner, slapping warnings on countless releases declaring that home taping would be the end of the music industry. Similarly, when Tim Berners-Lee plunged the world into an age of digital downloads and file sharing, the music industry again went into panic mode – and, to be fair, it was a little more warranted this time around.
After all, the internet revolutionised music piracy, and the industry was too slow to respond with any major force to curb that rise, barring the constant stream of ‘you wouldn’t steal a car’ ads and bizarre lawsuits from the likes of Metallica. As such, the few artists who immediately embraced the internet age did quite well out of it. David Bowie, for instance, was among the first to release music digitally, as was his fellow artistic visionary, Prince.
Even for the most open-minded of music fans, though, it would be difficult to envision any stalwarts of classic rock (a scene still dominated by extensively cared-for mint-condition vinyl LPs and audiophile hifi setups), throwing themselves into the ones and zeros of the internet age. Those fans, however, must have underestimated the great Jimmy Page, who threw himself wholeheartedly into the 21st century with Live at the Greek.
A potentially unexpected collaborative effort between the former Led Zeppelin guitarist and 1980s American southern-rock outfit The Black Crowes, Live at the Greek was essentially a run-of-the-mill live album taken from the pair’s performance at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles a year prior, in 1999. What truly made the album interesting, aside from the various performances of Zeppelin classics, was the method in which it was released.
Rather than sticking out a CD and maybe offering a limited edition version pressed on vinyl for the few purists still sticking to their collections of wax, Live at the Greek was initially released exclusively as a download via MusicMaker.com. Although that website faded into the ether only a year later, thanks to the prevalence of piracy sites, it was fairly trailblazing in its operation; users could order customised CDs by paying-per-track, sort of like a proto-iTunes.
What’s more, the fact that a musician as established and beloved as Jimmy Page, who was firmly on the upper echelon of rock royalty at that time, was the driving force behind that advancement was all the more important. Various young musicians had already devoted their lives to the digital sphere by the year 2000, but when Page seemingly endorsed its music-sharing potential, it opened that possibility up to a much wider audience of traditional rock fans.
Eventually, Live at the Greek was repressed on a CD, MusicMaker liquidated, and the landscape of digital downloads sprawled out into countless different directions, spawning both the MP3 boom and the current domination of music streaming. However, that seemingly inconsequential live album still played a vital role in transitioning the music industry from analogue to digital.
