Todd Rundgren has always been a musician slightly ahead of the times. When he was a teenager in suburban Philadelphia, Rundgren began to build a reputation as a prodigy with the power pop group Nazz. In 1972, at the age of 24, he released the double album "Something/Anything," an acknowledged pop music masterpiece.
Later, with the band Utopia, Rundgren would help pioneer the rock music video format long before MTV ever took to the airwaves. He is credited with developing the first digital paint program for personal computers (which was licensed to Apple in 1981), and his 1995 CD, "The Individualist," was among the first releases formatted for use as an interactive CD-ROM.
Now, at the age of 51, Rundgren is once again ahead of the pop music curve. Patronet, his latest project, could revolutionize the music industry if it succeeds. Through his web site (www.tr-i.com) Rundgren has enlisted 1,500 subscribers who are, in effect, paying him to create music.
"They sign on for enough money for me to produce music for them, which I then deliver by mail, or electronically (via the Internet)," Rundgren says in a recent phone interview. "At the end of a year's worth of this production, I then have a whole CD which I can distribute the conventional way."
The concept might seem to inhibit creativity, and the very idea of patronage recalls medieval times when the wealthy supported musicians and artists. But Rundgren proposes his methodology is actually liberating artistically.
"Now, I write music whenever I have an idea, because I know there's an audience that wants to hear it," he says. "So, if a musical idea pops in my head, I don't file it and wait for that time once every two or three years. I get into the studio to lay everything down. Now, it's more about making music all the time, and in that sense I feel more like a creator of music and less like a promoter."
Although this approach seems to be cutting edge, Rundgren says it's throwback to the 1950s, when artists would record one song at a time. If that record sold well, they would return to the studio and cut another track.
"You don't think in terms of 10, 15 songs at once, anyway," he says. "And in reality, a lot of artists didn't make the transition to the album format. The evidence today is that there are maybe a couple of songs that you want to listen to on any given format, and the rest you don't care about."
The Internet has also given Rundgren the opportunity to connect with longtime fans who long for music that is relative to their lives.
"Music, at least in my lifetime, has always been something that seems to resonate with youth, and youth sort of owns it," he says. "The cyclical nature of music is that the new generation doesn't necessarily want to hear new subject matter, they want to hear their own generation singing about it. They identify with it more strongly if it's one of their own. But an older audience, if they happen to be online, can maintain a connection to an artist they're interested in."
So wither the record companies in this scheme? "By nature, they're like dinosaurs," he says. "They're big, slow moving, dumb and destined to die. They're in trouble because of one thing - the idea that artists don't need them, that artists can market directly to audiences without needing the five major labels owned by giant, entertainment conglomerates."
copyright © 1999 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.