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Ivors Lifetime Achievement winner Peter Gabriel offers his fellow stars - and their fans - a bold solution to a new world

This article has been reproduced by kind permission of Peter Gabriel/The Times 4 May 2007

How artists can earn in a ‘won’t pay’ world

Many people no longer want to pay for recorded music - it’s a fact. They will pay above the odds to go to a live concert, they will even pay for mobile ringtones of their favourite artists, but the majority of people under 30 can’t or won’t pay for online recorded music any more. It’s a reality that all artists - including myself - have to learn to accept and adapt to.

There will always be a demand for music. People are willing to pay for some forms of access, and others they aren’t, at least not directly. It’s learning how to take advantage of this new music world that will allow artists to survive as the digital music revolution evolves.

The dilemma in this ‘can’t pay won’t pay’ digital world is: how do record labels and artists find a way to supply their fans with free recorded content, without being deprived of their own livelihood? Many young and minority-interest artists have been dependent on record sales, now apparently disappearing at the rate of 30 per cent a year.

My own first involvement with the music business was at a 2.5 per cent royalty rate (1.75 per cent outside the UK). Today 50-50 deals between record company and artist are common.

The dilemma before the Sixties and the revolution that the Beatles spearheaded was how artists could get more control over their careers. That was a long and hard fight. I don’t want to see that level of independence lost in the survival struggles now taking place.

The music world has been turned upside down and I love some of the new ways

There are, as you would expect in the digital world, many different models that can be tried out. The new company We7 (www.we7.com) is one that I am currently supporting. The principle is simple: it’s an advertising-funded music download service that gives everyone what they want. Fans get free downloads and artists get paid. The only ‘cost’ is listening to some ads, which people do all the time on commercial radio. In the We7 model we intend to personalise the ads, based on information that the consumer volunteers, which should make them more useful and digestible. Artists would also have the chance to exclude some advertising to which they had ethical objections. In addition, an average hour of self-chosen content from We7 would have approximately two minutes per hour of ads against an average of nine minutes per hour in commercial radio.
Some artists will refuse to have anything to do with advertising, which I understand and respect. However, in most situations like radio we don’t get to influence the ads that surround our music - or, for that matter, directly share in ad income.

Of course, there will be those in the industry who feel that, even if you can develop ad-funded models whereby artists still get paid, at the transaction level music should never be free, because people should expect to pay for the commodity they receive. For years I would have agreed; however, the fundamental revolution that has occurred is that value has left ownership and moved to access. It used to be said that possession was nine-tenths of the law, but you can see - in a world where hits on a site are valued higher than sales, in which I don’t have to own a huge printed library when I can google or go to Wikipedia - that access is king.

In the old world copyright - the right to make copies - was based on physical goods. In the digital world that rug has been pulled away. We need to be fluid, fast and flexible and explore all the new models emerging. How can you compete with free? The We7 model is one solution that artists can try. Filtering content is another.

I would encourage all artists to explore all the options open to them in the digital world. Some ideas will work for them, others won’t, but whichever way they go there are lots of new opportunities. Build your own database and make a direct relationship with your fans. I’ll agree that the old commercial models made it easier to predict what was happening, but I find this present world much more exciting and hopefully more democratic. After all, only online can artists - wherever they are in the world, whatever language they speak -reach a global audience instantaneously.

A cheap video on YouTube can reach the world in one hit. The music world has been turned upside down and I love some of the new ways of doing things. Real talent has a better chance now, more than ever, of finding an audience.

This isn’t to say there is no role for record labels in this digital world. The labels still have some amazing content and some smart people working it, and if they learn how to reinvent themselves they should still be able to survive. Most artists don’t want to do many of the jobs record companies do for them.

However, the playing field has levelled because the independent labels, and artists choosing to do it themselves, can respond more quickly to the world changing around them. This must be healthy. The decimation of the record retail business has made it much harder for some minority artists to get exposure, but new doors have opened up as the old ones have closed. This is the beauty of digital music - the endless opportunities it affords artists to find people who want to listen to them and for fans to discover music they might never have otherwise known existed.