Ziggy played guitar (but never took his eyes off the business)

Thirty years after the release of 'Ziggy Stardust', David Bowie is leading a DIY revolution that will liberate creative artists from the imploding music industry

'Time," David Bowie once sang, "is waiting in the wings." At the age of 55 Bowie himself will re-enter from stage left with a flourish this week, defying time and the rule that old rockers become increasingly irrelevant as the years go by.

Thursday sees the start of the latest "Meltdown" season of performances at London's Royal Festival Hall which Bowie has curated, following in the footsteps of the likes of Scott Walker and Elvis Costello; meanwhile the 30th anniversary of the release of his landmark album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars is being marked with a special edition double CD.

So much for nostalgia. Tomorrow is the official release date for Bowie's new album, Heathen. This haunting, haunted meditation on faith and its absence is notable for two reasons. Besides receiving the most positive advance notices of any new Bowie record for a very long time, it represents his first work since the 1980s with producer Tony Visconti, a collaborator on some of the singer's best work such as Ziggy and Scary Monsters.

Most significantly of all, the CD is being released, at Bowie's own insistence, without anti-piracy copy-protection coding. Depending on which system an individual record company uses, the coding either prevents audio CDs being played on home computers or degrades the sound quality to make them unlistenable.

Bowie's decision represents a direct challenge to the music industry's conventional wisdom, which fears a "meltdown" of a very different kind to the one Bowie is promoting at the Festival Hall: a meltdown of corporate profits due to the alleged proliferation of home copying and corresponding slump in CD sales.

This doesn't mean that Bowie, in some mid-life regression to his hippie past, has suddenly decided to start giving his money away. Far from it. Despite the fact that his aggregate sales over 30-odd years of record making don't begin to match those of The Beatles or Elton John, he is an extremely wealthy man indeed.

Bowie was once legendary for "play[ing] the wild mutation as a rock and roll star", using periodic, chameleonic self-reinvention as a primary artistic tool while Madonna was still a schoolgirl in Michigan. He kept this up for almost 20 years, restlessly shifting from Brit-Blues moddy-boy to suave young cabaret singer, to curly-haired hippie, to languorous androgyne, to cosmic rent-boy, to slick-suited soul-man, to Weimar decadent, to alienated alien, to electronic angst merchant, to melancholic Pierrot, to dashing English gentleman about the arts.

The latest incarnation – as a settled, happily married Manhattan resident who recently celebrated both his 10th wedding anniversary and the birth of a new baby daughter – is far less contrived. It also includes another unfamiliar aspect, that of one of rock's sharpest businessmen. The lessons learned after a major financial disaster in the Seventies following the split from his Ziggy-era manager Tony DeFries, have been thoroughly applied to life and money. If David Bowie is relaxed about releasing a CD without copy-protection, it's safe to say that he is not only sure of what he's doing, but that he knows something the more orthodox music business doesn't.

"There's a party in my head," he told a recent interviewer, mischievously quoting a lyric by his friend David Byrne. "Well, it might be a marketing conference."

Bowie's first spectacular business coup was to float himself on the financial markets – the $55m Bowie Bonds, raising serious capital by using future royalties from his substantial back catalogue as collateral. He was also one of the first musicians to make genuine inventive use of the internet as a means of adapting to the changed realities of the music business.

Punch davidbowie.com into your search engine and see for yourself. If you sign up for membership, as opposed to simply visiting and browsing, you get first crack at show tickets (or, in some cases, free admission), access to recordings unavailable elsewhere, a chance to listen to "Bowie radio", chatroom sessions in which the man himself participates, and even – for those who choose BowieNet as an internet service provider – an email address @davidbowie.com.

The website has its origins in the perks offered by old-style fan clubs – The Beatles once sent theirs an exclusive "Christmas Record" of Goony improvised comedy – but it's also an online store and a meeting place. "One of the coolest things about being David Bowie," he recently told visitors to his website, "is having David Bowie fans."

BowieNet also offers a way to avoid the indignity of slugging it out in the charts with performers half his age. Despite having pioneered their use from the Seventies onwards, he no longer bothers to make the expensive videos that bite such chunks out of an artist's income. Instead, like cult artists such as Frank Zappa or the Grateful Dead before him, he works directly to and with the "Bowie community": a relationship that is intimate and satisfying to all concerned, and also hugely profitable for the artist.

Heathen and its excellent accompanying single "Slow Burn" will be displayed in the shops and played on TV and radio. Bowie will indeed be talking to the press. Nevertheless, the real action will be online.

In this, as so often before in his career, Bowie has assumed a prophetic role within mainstream culture by appropriating the tactics of lesser-known avant garde artists. The American folksinger and feminist icon Ani DiFranco has done extremely well by using the internet as her primary means of connecting to her audience. You can obtain her records in stores, but DiFranco would prefer you to buy them directly from her online. By eliminating conventional distribution and retail elements from the chain, she makes up to 10 times the profit from a single sale than she'd make from the same CD bought over a Tower counter. Which means, simply enough, that she can make as much money, and live as comfortably, as artists with 10 times her sales. Comfort indeed these days, as she has sold around a million albums. Charlotte Greig, a young British singer songwriter who has followed DiFranco's lead in recording and publishing herself says: "Labels are much less important than they used to be, because CDs are now so cheap to make. The punk do-it-yourself dream is finally coming true."

In the week Victoria Beckham was ignominiously fired by her record company after only selling a reported 50,000 copies of an album which cost £5m to record, the writing is on the wall for the big corporations of the music industry.

As an artist who has had a formative hand in everything from punk to New Romanticism, white soul to electronica and gender-bending glam to Euro-crooning, it should come as no surprise that David Bowie has seen that writing earlier and more clearly than most.

Charles Shaar Murray started writing for the underground press and 'New Musical Express' just before 'Ziggy Stardust' was released. His latest book is 'Boogie Man', a biography of John Lee Hooker (Penguin)