On this day, 30 years ago, June 27, 1994, Geffen Records and Aerosmith made history when “Head First” became the first major-label song made available for exclusive digital download. An unused cut from the Get a Grip session, it was part of a week-long promotion by CompuServe during which fans could download Aerosmith music from the net.
Download speeds were so slow at the time that it took between 60 and 90 minutes to download the track, but ten thousand CompuServe subscribers still made the effort to get the tune.
“If our fans are out there driving down that information superhighway,” said Steven Tyler at the time, “then we want to be playing at the truck stop. This is the future – so let’s get it going.
Offering a song for digital download was a tech experiment carried out both for its industry-altering potential and for the hell of it. It was the brainchild of three relatively new Geffen employees: Jim Griffin, Robert von Goeben, and Luke Wood. It was a marketing ploy, a flash of the future, an iceberg for a titanic industry, and 4.3 megabyte “Head First” was earlier used as the B-side for “Eat the Rich”.tes of riffs and double entendres, available as a WAV file.
History of Sorts 