Downloader Eno

Forward-thinking Eno doesn’t like buying music from record shops

18 August 2008 - Brian Eno has been explaining why he and David Byrne have joined the download revolution; saying the music industry needed a shake up.

The new album from the recent Coldplay producer and former Talking Heads' leader, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today , is released today (18 August).

Eno previously told 6 Music about how they came to collaborate again, 27 years on from their 1981 album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts .

But the new record is available as a download only, from everythingthathappens.com in a host of special download formats – the album was preceded by a freebie single called Strange Overtones (4 August).

Eno says that the download revolution has come at the right time because he felt the music industry had grown complacent: “The music industry really had a free ride. There was a huge appetite for buying music and they were selling it quite expensively actually, that fostered a generally quite lazy attitude within record companies.

“And then suddenly when challenged by the possibility of a different future, their only response was to try to resist it and to say that it isn’t going to happen and we’ll stop it from happening.”

"The music industry really had a free ride. There was a huge appetite for buying music and they were selling it quite expensively actually."
Brian Eno

He admitted that he prefers the modern way of purchasing music, telling 6 Music: “I myself noticed that I have stopped buying CD’s. I buy from itunes. I don’t like actually going into record shops much.”

Brian Eno told us that it's a young artist’s game these days, with or without the help of record labels, due to the growing online world: “Suddenly now we have a quite different situation which it seems to me, artists understand much better than record companies do.”

And he reckons that because of the all the online outlets, younger artists have more control now than ever: “Artists know how to use it, young artists are very comfortable with starting their careers on Facebook or Myspace or something like that – and they’re way ahead of the record companies in some respects.”

Eno and Byrne are even offering two of the songs as separate tracks so that budding remix artists can create their own versions.

An enhanced CD and a deluxe package CD of the album will be available later.

Read more from Eno about Byrne’s voice and their tour plans.

Georgie Rogers