Rockbites: Discipline Global Mobile’s serious reality check

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April 2002 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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Discipline Global Mobile’s serious reality check
26 April 2002

Salisbury, England based Discipline Global Mobile, the most artist-centric record label on the planet, this month quitely revealed that their business model has failed and that they are moving forward with a new, more focused vision, wiser for their mistakes.
    The company is not now bankrupt, wrote Robert Fripp (label co-founder and guitarist for King Crimson) a couple of weeks ago. But it would go that way within the year were it to continue down the same path. DGM will move forward as a less ambitious entity, continuing its current customer service but abandoning any artists other than those directly associated with King Crimson.
    A couple of years ago, Fripp and David Singleton founded DGM on the premise that all its artists would retain 100% ownership of their creative output, including their master tapes, their albums, their names, and their Websites. The label would handle production and distribution but the artists would be largely responsible for their own promotion. The label would earn back its investment by assuming a role of shareholder in the artist’s profits.
    The missing key to the kingdom, as it were, was a mechanism to get enough people to buy records by poorly known artists. Major labels seem to solve that problem with a shotgun approach: invest just a bit in a slew of bands, see who makes it, and unceremoniously drop the rest while ensuring that they, not the company, suffer the losses.
    DGM, however, based its business model on ethics—partly out of personal honor and partly as a reaction against the majors. They refused to profit by way of exploitation—but didn’t discover or invent a suitable replacement.
    Today the folks at DGM maintain their honor, but move forward not so much as a record label but as “...a business structure & vehicle for the projects of Robert Fripp, David Singleton & The Vicar, trading under precepts of the ethical company.” See Robert Fripp’s diary for more on the lessons learned. | Discipline Global Mobile | | Robert Fripp's diary | | top of page |

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