Crib sheet.(Forum)

Last week at Midem, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno announced details of Mudda, a musicians union that aims to help artists make the most of the new digital world.

So, what exactly Is Mudda?

To give it its full title, it is the Musical Union of Digitally Downloading Artists. Right now it is little more than a nifty little passport-sized manifesto, a website (mudda.org) and an e-mail address (mudda@mudda.org), but founders Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno have e-mailed all their contacts to get them interested and they've got big ideas.

Like what exactly?

Well, they want to create an alliance that helps artists to harness the potential of the web, to find new ways of expressing themselves and getting their art over to their fans. Oh, and by art, they don't just mean standard singles and albums, bet demos, alternative mixes, unreleased tracks, five recordings--the lot. "I'm very aware of the constriction of the CD format--you have to release 50 minutes of music when you might only have six minutes that you want to release," says Eno, who compares the situation to an imaginary art world in which galleries only showed masterpieces painted in oils that were four foot by 12 foot in size. "Now you can show the doodles that you made on a table napkin alongside the masterpiece."

Don't A&R people and record companies exist precisely to provide a quality filter to separate the doodles from the masterpiece?

Don't be such a cynic. Record companies don't always get it right--and besides, Gabriel and Eno say it is high time the artists had more control over the decisions as to what to release, when and hi what form. "It's about the idea of soiling a process, not a product, with all the different mistakes and wrong turns you make along the route, which could be very interesting to the hardcore fall and you don't need too many people interested for it to be economically viable," says Gabriel.