Psst: want to know the future of cyberspace? You could try asking a rock star. Why? Well, some of them have turned out to be perceptive futurologists. Eight years ago, for example, David Bowie said this to a New York Times reporter: "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. 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. 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."

Bowie then went on to make one of the most perceptive observations anyone's ever made about our networked world. Music, he said, "is going to become like running water or electricity". To appreciate the significance of this, remember that he was speaking in 2002, a year after Apple unleashed the iPod on an unsuspecting world. At the time, millions of people were transfixed by the idea that they could carry their entire music collections around with them in a tiny device. But Bowie perceived that this blissful state might just be transitory– that iPod users were, in fact, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unreliable or unsafe. In a comprehensively networked world, Bowie surmised, people would eventually become more relaxed about carrying their supplies of bottled music: when they needed it, they would just get it streamed from the network.

Six years later came the launch of Spotify, an astonishing service which streams music with very little buffering delay, and which has become so successful that it eventually had to close subscriptions to its free (i.e. ad-supported) service. Admission is now strictly by invitation only, but paid subscriptions are, as you might expect, readily available. Anyone who has used Spotify will instantly recognise the perceptiveness of Bowie's insight all those years ago.

Music has been one of the most powerful drivers of internet development because, after alcohol and sex, it's probably the thing young people value most. And when people want something that badly, then they will get it one way or another. The record labels spent nearly two decades pretending that the net didn't exist. They persisted with a business model based on plastic discs which made it unprofitable to supply individual tracks. But the demand for tracks endured – and eventually a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Napster made tracks available to anyone with a PC and an internet connection. The result shattered the industry, leaving it utterly dependent on a computer company – Apple – which found a way of legally supplying tracks.

Now spool forward again to today, when the angst du jour is how to get people to pay for online "content". Once again, the most perceptive insight may come from the music business – specifically from an iconic 60s band, the Grateful Dead, whose archives have recently been donated to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Marking the event in a recent article in The Atlantic, author Joshua Green reminded us of how the Dead pioneered ideas and practices that are only now being reluctantly embraced by corporate America. "One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans," Green observes. The band "established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets". He adds: "Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation."

Quite so. More significantly, though, the Grateful Dead decided that they wouldn't try to stop people making bootleg recordings of their concerts, figuring that what they lost in royalties would be more than compensated for by being more widely known, and by the resulting sales of merchandise. It turned out that they were right. The band anticipated by decades the "Freemium" business model now being touted by expensive managerial gurus. Stand by for a best-selling business book entitled Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead. And if you want to know the future, ask a musician.