“It’s time to put the corpse of what we know as the record industry in the ground and let some other beautiful things start to grow out of it,” said Peter Gabriel his week.

The forward-thinking artist was speaking as he accepted the Personality of the Year award at the MIDEM international music conference in Cannes. Gabriel urged musicians and those in the music industry to embrace changes in technology, rather than fighting them.

The music industry has been suffering greatly at the hands of filesharing and illgeal free music downloads, but its attempts to deal with the problem have been in direct opposition to the great advance in technology that have been made over the past five years.

Gabriel is a smart guy. He recently launched We7, an internet service offering legal, free music downloads. The free music downloads are paired with advertisements that pay the artists. Gabriel has put about $6 million into the project so far and he says that 1.5 million free music downloads have been given to date.

The thinking behind the advertisements is that young people are used to hearing music in advertising environments. Gabriel also touched on the idea of artists in the future releasing legal music downloads followed by physical CDs.

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