Peter Gabriel is launching a new subscription music download store featuring high-quality, lossless recordings from new artists. The Music Club, launched by speaker manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins with Gabriel’s Real World Studios, will cost £23.95 for six months or £33.95 annually, giving subscribers a DRM-free album every month from upcoming artists who record at Gabriel’s Bath-based studio. Debut artists include Little Axe and Grindhouse. Rights on the recordings return to the artists after two months.

Lossless music right now is pitched at a very small segment of buyers - those who realise MP3s don’t sound as good as the CDs from which they were ripped, especially on high-end audio systems. But, when more broadband connections can transfer the large files quickly in future, lossless may become the default format. Radiohead released a FLAC version of In Rainbows in Decembers.

Gabriel (via Uncut): “One of the things that’s frustrating about the digital revolution – of which I am a huge fan – is that the audio quality has taken a giant step backwards. A lot of what we hear on iPods and so on is super-compressed and people have got used to this. For those of us who have really worked hard to get things to sound good and full and rich and build landscapes out of sound, it’s very frustrating.”

Gabriel co-founded OD2, one of the first online music distributors, in 1999 before it was bought by Loudeye in 2004 for $40 million and then sold to Nokia (NYSE: NOK). He’s currently an investor in Oxford startup We7, which glues audio adverts ahead of music tracks, and in recommendation site The Filter. Some of Gabriel’s own interests are currently offline, however, after a break-in at his ISP’s data centre.

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