Dave Stewart has just had a baby and looks knackered. Admittedly, Anoushka Fisz, his 31-year-old photographer wife, has been doing most of the work, and, admittedly, Stewart, with his scruffy goatee and droopy eyes, looks pretty knackered most of the time anyway, but the ex-Eurythmic, who has spent the last two days flitting between hospital and work, really looks likes he could use some kip.

He slumps down at the kitchen table at Church Studios in Crouch End, where he does most of his recording, asks one of the staffers to bring him some food and, at my request, fiddles with the lap-top he's carrying to find a digital picture of his 12-hour-old daughter - Indya. "She's beautiful," I say dutifully, referring to the baby pictured in the shot, who is being held between her beaming mother and Annie Lennox. "Yeah." Is she your fourth? "Yeah." Your second with Anoushka? "Yeah." You must have had a long couple of days? "Yeah."

If these monosyllabic replies continue, we could be heading for the shortest interview in press history. Maybe he should go get some rest, answer all those congratulatory messages that keep setting his mobile off every two minutes and do this interview another time... But then, suddenly, at the very first mention of Artist Network, the reason for our meeting and a project that Stewart has been nurturing for seven years, the 49-year-old Sunderland-born singer/songwriter/producer springs to life.

The inspiration behind the new project, he explains fervently and at length, has been the complete failure of the entertainment industries - particularly the music business - to nurture talent. The creative industries are, he says, increasingly beset by corruption and rely, increasingly, on soulless corporate tactics that demolish talent and individuality just to boost short-term profits.

"There is total corruption in the music industry - it's like Enron. There's a corporate front end, but at the back end there's all this wheeling and dealing. It's a rip-off. The amount of money we've made [as the Eurythmics] compared to the amount of money we've made for the people around us is minuscule. It happens to every artist. People say that Motown was a great label, but it was the greatest cotton field of all - loads of the artists got tiny royalties. Loads died without a gravestone, yet their songs have sold millions and millions."

Artist Network, which hasn't had an official external launch and which hasn't, until now, sought any publicity, says it aims to break away from the ingrained habits of the industry by "challenging the traditional models of entertainment businesses".

At its core there is an independent record label, which will offer musicians more generous royalty rates than conventional deals, more transparent contracts and a greater degree of creative freedom and artistic development.

"The music industry is all about picking up some talent, fucking it up and then dropping it. We want to actually develop artists over time - provide an alternative to the mass-produced and meaningless product being churned out by the music industry, to things like Pop Idol. We're the opposite of that.

It's about giving artists a better deal and creative freedom.

"Traditionally, if a musician like Bob Dylan writes poems, the record company will say, 'can you put it to music please?' They never think, like, shall we put a poetry book out? They just want to put artists through a machine. It's like McDonald's, a conveyor belt. We want to change that. Artist Network will create a new paradigm for the entertainment industries, an entertainment company that is artist- friendly, that can work by a different rulebook."

Alongside Artist Network's music division, there will also be film, TV, publishing, and visual arts divisions, all infused with the same objective - "to deliver the richer, deeper, more diverse and more var html = getAdHTML('fmbut2',88,31);document.write(html);