"WHEN Charles Grimsdale, a British investor, started the Internet music venture OD2 in 1999, he had a hard time persuading large record companies to license their music. But when he approached the rock musician Peter Gabriel about putting his music catalog online, he got a very different response: Mr. Gabriel was not only willing, he also wanted to take a stake in the company.

While major record companies have spent heavily on the Internet with relatively little to show, Mr. Gabriel and his partners started OD2 on a tight budget, built it into a digital delivery platform that retailers like Virgin used on their Web sites, and sold it in 2004 for $40.5 million.

“When most labels were banging their heads, he got it and saw the liberating value of Internet distribution to artists, and that’s what excited him," says Mr. Grimsdale, a partner at Eden Ventures, of Mr. Gabriel. "He has a very good sense technologically of what’s going to work."

OD2’s success also catapulted Mr. Gabriel, after decades as a top-selling artist, into a second career as a powerful player in the emerging online music industry, a move that once seemed more outlandish than the costumes he wore in the early 1970s as a singer for the rock group Genesis.

But Mr. Gabriel, the son of an inventor, keeps devising new ways for musicians and record labels to use the Web to control their work and to make--not lose-- money...

"Peter approaches business the way he approaches his music: it’s not digital, it’s organic," says Thomas Dolby, a musician who has enjoyed his own business success as the co-designer of the Beatnik ring-tone synthesizer, a utility included in more than a billion Nokia mobile phones. "I am impressed that he’s achieved so much in the business world.""


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Before reading this article, I'd never heard that about Thomas Dolby! I'd recently been wondering what he was up to, guess he's doing okay for himself!

Interesting read

Thanks 4 the update.