Veteran musician and multimedia pioneer Todd Rundgren plans to offer his studio musings exclusively via an Internet subscription service.
Beginning in late February or early March, fans will dial into Rundgren's site (http://www.wakingdreams.com/) to receive partially completed song tracks, participate in chats with the artist and receive updates on artwork for the finished product. Each subscription will last as long as it takes Rundgren to complete each album; the service, dubbed PatroNet, is expected to cost around $25.
"Why not eliminate the middleman now that the Web and this kind of connectivity make it possible to communicate point-to-point with these people?" Rundgren asks.
Electronic distribution has been contemplated by many Net-savvy artists, but technology limitations have so far limited it to dreaming. Music industry consultant Thomas White says Rundgren's move "is the beginning of what very likely will be a massive defection from traditional retail to on-demand services," but he concedes that a mass movement is still far in the future.
Rundgren, best known for his early '70s hits Hello, It's Me and We Gotta Get You a Woman, has been in the technology vanguard since multimedia began. He released No World Order on CD-ROM and CD-i in 1993 and the Enhanced CD The Individualist in 1995.
Even with PatroNet, finished CDs will be available in stores at regular prices; online subscribers will be able to buy them for the manufacturing cost. But Rundgren is banking that people will be willing to pay for the privilege of hearing his work as it's being produced.
"Once a month they might get a little e-mail notice that there's a new tune and that they can go to a special site and download a copy," he says.
He expects his productivity and creativity to be enhanced: "You don't have to be so precious about everything because it's not going through that long and expensive manufacturing process of being enshrined on a plastic disc."
He's also applying the subscription model to an autobiography deal with Avon Books that will allow him to serialize the work before it hits print.
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