THE rock musician Peter Gabriel is providing financial backing for a new download service called We7, which will offer free songs tagged with 10-second advertisements.

The launch of We7 is an acknowledgment that pirate web-sites offering music for nothing have made many young people reluctant to pay for it.

Despite the success of Apple’s iTunes store, it is dwarfed by the scale of illicit downloading.

“This is one way of resolving this dilemma,” said Gabriel. “It was something that was going to happen whether I liked it or not.”

We7 is hoping that with well-targeted advertising, consumers “are getting something that will not be offensive, and [in return] they will have access to a lot of free music and free media”.

The advertising revenues will be shared with the artists and performers.

Gabriel’s partner in the venture is Steve Purdham, the founder and former chief executive of Surf Control, the online security company that on Friday recommended a £201m takeover offer.

Purdham, who will be We7’s chief executive, said the firm would be able to charge advertisers 30p to 60p for each track downloaded. The tracks will be in the MP3 file format, and therefore free of copyright protection and capable of being played on Apple’s iPods, the dominant music player.

A short advertisement will precede each track downloaded. Purdham said that after about four weeks – “when the song had been listened to three, four or five times” – We7’s users would be able to download an ad-free version.

Those who don’t want to wait will have the option of buying tracks without the advertisements.

Gabriel was the founder of OD2, or On Demand Distribution, a digital-music business that provides copyright-protected songs to Microsoft’s MSN and other online music stores that use the Windows Media format.

The success of the iPod/ iTunes combination restricted OD2’s growth. The business was acquired by Nokia last year and will provide the foundation for the mobile-phone company’s own music service, which will be launched shortly.

We7 has built a trial site, but Purdham said the company would not launch to consumers until the summer. The firm still needs to license music from the record companies – a process that Gabriel believes will be much easier than when OD2 was getting established.

Purdham expects to launch with a choice of only a few thousand songs but said “we can get to 250,000 in a fairly short period of time”.

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