When David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, such was the scale of media coverage and public mourning that one would have presumed his music would be everywhere for ever, elevated as he was, to misquote Smash Hits, to the position of the People’s Dame. It was briefly – Starman reached No 18, and Space Oddity No 24 – but then it wasn’t.
Each year, Forbes compiles a posthumous celebrity rich list. Bowie appeared in 2016, ranked at No 11 with estimated earnings of $10.5m (£7.8m), and again in 2017, in the same position but with earnings of $9.5m (£7m). This was unsurprising given the enormous spike in interest there is in the immediate aftermath of a superstar’s death. Yet he didn’t appear in the Forbes list again until 2022, when he was at No 3 with earnings of $250m (£195m) – the highest-ranked musician that year – but that was almost all attributable to the sale of his music publishing rights to Warner Chappell.
Unlike Prince, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Bob Marley or Michael Jackson, Bowie has not become a Forbes fixture. And with publishing now removed from his earnings tally, he is unlikely to reappear in that list unless the estate sells the master recordings from 1968 onwards that it owns and currently licenses to Warner Music Group.
Financial success is one measurement of posthumous success and importance. Streaming is another, where Bowie also underperforms for an artist of his stature. He currently has 22 million monthly listeners on Spotify compared with Bob Marley’s 26 millon, Whitney Houston’s 34 million, Elvis Presley’s 45 million and John Lennon’s 43 million. Only one Bowie track makes it into Spotify’s “Billions Club”: Under Pressure, with more than 2bn plays. But that is presumably driven by Queen’s involvement, especially given they have a further seven tracks with more than a billion streams each.
One explanation for this may be the Bowie estate’s difficulties in courting a new, young audience. While Bowie has an official profile on Instagram with three millon followers, and TikTok with 656k, with the latter especially being home to younger fans, the estate’s focus has leaned heavily towards expensive box sets such as Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976) and I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002–2016), as well as a plethora of live albums (13 in total since his death). This approach serves affluent middle-aged fans – but the releases are out of the price range and field of interest for teenagers who might become the Bowie obsessives of tomorrow. There has only been one greatest hits album released since his death, Legacy (The Very Best of David Bowie) in November 2016. It is arguable in the streaming age that playlists such as This Is David Bowie on Spotify and David Bowie Essentials on Apple Music do a better job.
Bowie has also become the unofficial patron saint of BBC 6 Music – a positive in some senses, albeit one that only goes so far given that just 2% of 6 Music’s audience are 24 or younger. Unlike in the 1980s, when he starred in Labyrinth (back in cinemas this week for its 40th anniversary) and The Snowman, there are few enticing entry points for the younger listeners who are essential to keep his legacy alive.
It could be argued that Bowie’s estate is prizing quality over quantity, by saying no to more things than it green-lights. It refused to license music to the Stardust biopic in 2021, endorsing instead Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream documentary in 2022. The documentary Bowie: The Final Act was well received when it was released last month, and shifts focus away from his imperial period in the 1970s to his commercial apex in the 1980s and his career beyond. There were also year-long Bowie 75 celebrations in 2021, to mark what would have been his 75th birthday, although that mostly seemed to mean a rash of pop-up shops in London and New York.
Unquestionably the most interesting estate project was the opening last year of the David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse in London, where 80,000 items from across his entire career – including handwritten lyrics, costumes and instruments – are stored. Tristram Hunt, the V&A’s director, called it a “new sourcebook for the Bowies of tomorrow” and it may prove to be the most enduring project.
This could be read as the estate focusing on his long-term legacy rather than a short-term “algorithmic legacy” of chasing viral hits on TikTok and Spotify, which would risk reducing his ever-changing art to one song. The use of “Heroes” in the finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things last week was clearly hoped to vivify the track – but it peaked at No 75 in the midweeks, and dropped subsequently. It also has only had 38k uses in TikTok videos to date – not exactly viral numbers. This is not a Running Up That Hill moment, introducing an act to new generations.
This quality-over-quantity thesis only holds up to a point. In 2022, the estate, albeit for charitable reasons, embraced the short-lived digital gimmickry of NFTs, doing so again in 2023 with an unheard version of Let’s Dance. And then there is the official Bowie store where, alongside the usual T-shirts and posters, you can buy a vast array of socks, a bar stool, a walnut cutting board or a baby’s bib. The site is choked with tchotchkes featuring the Aladdin Sane flash that has become synonymous with Bowie, reducing his many visual incarnations to a brief moment in 1973 – not unlike how US rockers Kiss became a visual brand more than a band. For such a future-facing artist, the future of Bowie’s legacy doesn’t seem so innovative, or assured.
