By Elizabeth Mitkos
Digital Journal — Two musical pioneers who have shaped, succeeded and challenged the last three decades of popular music have joined forces under a new mandate: to transform musical creativity and digitally enhance the current state of music distribution. Rock legends Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel are creating a musicians’ alliance called the Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists, a.k.a. MUDDA.
MUDDA aims to transform the music business by bringing artists on level terms with record companies, so they can receive fair payments and have new opportunities to be their own retailer. Making the announcement earlier this year at the 39th installment of MIDEM (an international music market that takes place in Cannes, France), Eno and Gabriel say they are embracing the “most fundamental transformation of the selling of music since records were first invented.” The two stars vouch to remove all restraints that for years have dictated what kind of music can be made, and when and how it can be sold.
“It’s a critical time where the music business is being transformed — some voluntary changes and some involuntary changes,” says former Genesis front man Gabriel. “[Eno and I] feel that, unless musicians think about what’s going on and how it could change both their situation creatively and commercially, [musicians] will be at the end of the food chain as usual.”
With the Internet transforming how people buy and listen to music, Eno and Gabriel say artists now need to think and act digitally so that the future of the music industry remains promising. It’s not about shutting down record labels. In fact, Gabriel owns Real World Records, a label that provides artists from around the world with access to state-of-the-art recording facilities and audiences beyond their geographic region.
With more than 30 years’ experience, Gabriel has been all over the music industry map. He recognizes the struggles in earning a living from performing and now wants to provide new artists with options outside the standard record deal. While Gabriel says record labels have served a purpose for musicians who are “good at making music and not necessarily good at marketing,” he makes clear that musicians should not be slaves to their labels either.
“Although there’s a potential fear that we will help speed up the process through which record companies become redundant, I think most executives see [MUDDA] as an opportunity that will encourage legal downloading and speed up the transformation for a new business to emerge,” says Gabriel.
The concept behind MUDDA began to unfold four years ago, when Gabriel co-founded On Demand Distribution (OD2), a European digital downloading service that works with major record labels such as EMI, Virgin, Mute and Telstar to enable artists to have access to greater distribution. Today, OD2 is Europe’s number one digital distributor and is about to launch in Australia and Asia this year. OD2 will support MUDDA, which Eno and Gabriel hope will see artists and record labels work together to reach vast audiences.
“I’ve been on both sides of the record business,” says Gabriel, who’s been signed to various major labels throughout his career. “I think there has to be a better way of going about things. The industry standard, for a long time, has been for labels to sign on for as little as possible, pay as little as possible and recruit as often as possible. When we started, we considered it lucky to be getting a royalty at all. The model of the future needs to be one of partnership.”
However, MUDDA faces some tricky problems moving to independent digital distribution. Many artists expressing interest in the alliance have signed their digital rights away to record companies.
“We can pay established artists who want to join the initiative more for recommending someone else’s song than what they’d get paid for their own song on iTunes,” says Gabriel. “I’m wearing two hats here because of OD2’s distribution being dependent on the majors for releasing material. But at the same time, I think MUDDA is going to benefit the labels as well as the artist — as equal partners and not commodities.”
MUDDA is currently working with artists to step outside the CD format, cutting more than half the production costs. Ideas include having an artist release a minute of music every day for a month as a teaser, or post several versions of the same song. It’s up to the artist.
MUDDA will work in different tiers, starting with more established artists who can open doors for others to walk through. Traditional aspects of the music business, such as publicity and promotion, will remain the same. Gabriel explains that established artists can retail on their own, while middle artists can start with a boost from sales aggregated through the MUDDA website, where they can earn more than what other digital retailers offer.
“Of course, if there isn’t the interest, I think a great opportunity will be lost,” says Gabriel. “But so far, I’m pretty confident we’re going to have enough interest. Some artists, I’m sure, will do very well being independent of the record industry. But most would still think they need some help with marketing, accounting, possibly banking their projects, and would tend to look to people who have experience, which would look like, if not actually being, record companies.
“MUDDA is coming from some idealistic hope that we could create a cooperatively owned artist entity to further artist interests and try and open the creative possibilities.”
