Rock Singers Plan Online Venture

Rock veterans Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are launching a musicians’ alliance that would cut against the industry grain by letting artists sell their music online instead of only through record labels.

With the Internet transforming how people buy and listen to songs, musicians need to act now to claim digital music’s future, Gabriel and Eno argued Monday as they handed out a slim red manifesto at a huge deal-making music conference known as Midem.

They call the plan the “Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists,” or MUDDA.

“Unless artists quickly grasp the possibilities that are available to them, then the rules will get written, and they’ll get written without much input from artists,” said Eno, who has a long history of experimenting with technology.

By removing record labels from the equation, artists can set their own prices and agendas, said the two independent musicians, who hope to start the online alliance within a month.

Their pamphlet lists ideas for artists to explore once they’re freed from the confines of the CD format. For example, a musician might decide to release a minute of music every day for a month, or post several recorded variations of the same song and ask fans what they like best.

Gabriel, who has a label called Real World Records, said he wasn’t trying to shut down the record companies but said he sought to give artists options. “There are some artists who already tried to do everything on their own,” he said, adding that those musicians often found they didn’t like marketing or accounting. “We believe there will be all sorts of models for this.”

What’s driving the movement is the success of legitimate download sites such as Apple’s Internet music store, iTunes, which sells songs for 99 cents a pop in the United States.

Both Gabriel and Eno started their careers in the 1960s and remain immensely influential.

Gabriel co-founded a European company, On Demand Distribution, which runs legal download sites in 11 European countries. The company would provide the technology for MUDDA, though Gabriel and Eno are looking for online partners.

“I’m an artist who works incredibly slowly,” Gabriel said. “If some of those [songs] could be made available, you don’t have to be so trapped into this old way of being confined only by the album cycle.”