Peter Gabriel just launched two new digital music ventures: We7 (an advertising-driven music site) and TheFilter.com ( a music recommendation site).
FREE SONG:'Salala!' - w/Peter Gabriel
We7 lets users choose between buying recordings and downloading a free version with a 10-second ad. Royalties from downloads on We7 are paid to the record companies, which then pay a portion to the artists. The company, based in Britain, already has a licensing agreement with one of the majors, Sony Music Entertainment.
With it's focus on label artists We7, while offering a new model, seems to cater more to the labels than to the artists. Indeed, Gabriel is quoted in the New York Times saying: “I don’t believe in the death of the major record companies, but as an artist, I’d love to see them reinvented as service companies.”
We7's gimmick is simple: you get your songs for free, in MP3, but each one has a short audio advertisement before the music starts. That’s it. I'm not quite sure this is the path to the new revolution though. My response to listening to a free downloaded track (along with the ad) was 'I don't think so...!' The ad is intrusive, despite being short, and did nothing to make me want to download more songs from We7. Imagine a playlist made entirely of We7-sourced songs, with an ad played between each and every one!? Much worse than commercial radio... I just can’t see the MySapce generation rushing out to download ad-infested files like this. And those that do will not find it too hard to delete the ads in an audio editor.
TheFilter.com provides music, film and video recommendations based on user preferences. And the site keeps track and publishes what their audience is listening to with interesting results: TheFilter.com recently said that the number of people listening to downbeat music from the likes of Morrissey and The Smiths has soared in the past months too. (Autor's note: I have to say that my personal reaction has been just the opposite -- lately I've been listening to more and more upbeat music that I can dance to...)
Gabriel's early entreprenuerial ventures include Real World Records and Womad, the World of Music, Arts and Dance festival. Womad, a showcase for world music that currently presents annual concerts and workshops in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. His Real World label has an expanding catalog of 150 albums by artists from around the world. (One of Calabash's success stories was working with Thomas Mapfumo's self-produced album as a digital-only release which caught the ears of Gabriel and was re-released on the Real World label.)
The FREE SONG:'Salala!' is from Angelique Kidjo's album 'Djin Djin' and features Peter Gabriel's vocals -- and comes to you Ad-Free!! ;-)
i really enjoy listening to this song
Posted by: emma | August 20, 2008 at 11:10 AM
Beautiful song, both amazing musicians...what can we expect??..of course this kind of perfection.
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