Peter Gabriel announces online music project

Peter Gabriel and speaker makers Bowers And Wilkins have teamed up to provide cheap album downloads in a new subscription service.

The music club is set to record exclusive albums live at Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, which will then be available to download for a month as MP3s.

One album will be offered each month to those who subscribe to the service, which will provide free studio time to the artists involved and also return their rights to the music after two months.

Artists so far set to be involved include Skip McDonald’s Little Axe Collective and singer-songwriter Gwyneth Herbert.

Explaining his involvement in the project, said: “This collaboration with B And W is unique as far as I know and it’s going to allow a lot of interesting projects to happen.

“For artists, Music Club is a dream proposition because they get some great time in the studio, access to really good recording facilities and can experiment without being committed to anything or anyone beyond a month with B And W.”

http://www.nme.com/news/peter-gabriel/36704

Peter Gabriel’s website is back
Peter Gabriel’s website and the website and ticket buying site for Womad, the world music festival he founded, are back online today after their servers and routers were stolen at the weekend.
Opal Telecom, which hosts the servers in High Wycombe, was unwilling to comment, but a spokesman for Gabriel’s music company Real World said thieves got into the data centre on Sunday night/Monday morning.
He said: “We’ve got pretty much everything back online now including Peter’s site and ticketing for Womad. And we can reassure people that all the financial details were stored elsewhere in a secure location and are safe. The thieves took servers and some core networking kit – routers. Despite the conspiracy theories we don’t think we were targeted, it was just a hardware theft.”
He thanked the tech team for doing such a good job of getting the site back online despite the Bank Holiday and for emailing all customers to reassure them their data was safe.
Robbers have targeted data centres before. Last year, thieves tricked security guards at a London centre by dressing as police officers. CI Host in Chicago was also hit.
Thieves are typically after hardware rather than data.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/07/womad_online_after_robbery/

Peter Gabriel’s Servers Stolen

Rocker Peter Gabriel’s Web site is running at partial capacity today. The reason: Thieves broke into the data center that hosts his site and stole his servers.

Stealing Peter Gabriel’s servers is one way to get digital copies of his hits
Here’s the message that greeted visitors to his site: “The majority of Real World, Peter Gabriel and WOMAD web services are currently off-line. Our servers were stolen from our ISP’s data centre on Sunday night – Monday morning. We are working to restore normal service as soon as possible.”
The Register tracked the data center to Opal Telecom. The people we spoke to there referred us to the marketing department. No one in marketing has yet returned our calls or emails. So right now, all we have is Peter Gabriel’s word. Also, we don’t know if the thieves were targeting Gabriel or if his tech equipment was stolen as part of a bigger heist.
We’re not ready to call robberies like this common. But we’ve seen our fair share of them – many of which happened in the U.K., where Opal is based. In December, thieves dressed as police officers broke into a London data center and walked away with $4 million of tech equipment. Armed thugs also robbed data centers in London in November and October. (It’s not a uniquely British phenomenon: There’s a data center in Chicago that has reportedly been broken into four times in the last two years.)
Not all data centers are easy to knock over. In response to a previous post on this topic we received a tour of a data center. The entry was walled off with bullet-proof glass and the premises were covered by cameras. There were even barriers to prevent someone from driving a truck into the building. Our conclusion was that you’d be better off just hiring a hacker to steal the data – if that’s what you were after. Odds are that Peter Gabriel’s servers will end up on eBay or some similar site.

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/05/06/peter-gabriels-servers-stolen/?mod=WSJBlog

Our man, Mr. Gabriel, is on Time’s list of top 100 most influential people this year.

See the full article here.