In 2012 Rundgren performed his iconic 1973 album A Wizard A True Star in concert in its entirety for the first time ever, and several years later did the same with a double bill: Todd & Healing. He has toured with Ringo Starr as an erstwhile member of the All-Starr Band since 1989, and continues to perform with symphony orchestras both domestically and internationally. His latest studio album, White Knight, was released last May, and this past spring he toured North America with original Utopians Kasim Sulton and Willie Wilcox for the first time in 33 years. His long-awaited autobiography The Individualist, was released on December 21. He embarks on the world’s first hybrid concert/book tour this coming April/May, highlighting music across his 50-year career.
Last year on successive weekends he was awarded honorary doctorates from both the Berklee School of Music and DePauw University.
In 1998 Todd debuted his new PatroNet technology which for the first time allowed fans of a musical artist to subscribe directly to the artist’s musical output via the Internet. This caps a long history of groundbreaking early multimedia “firsts”, including:
• 1978: The first interactive television concert, broadcast live over the Warner/QUBE system in Columbus, Ohio (the home audience chose each song.in real time during the concert by voting via QUBE’s 2-way operating system).
• 1978: The first live nationally broadcast stereo radio rock concert (by microwave), linking 40 cities around the country.
• 1979: The opening of Utopia Video Studios, a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art facility. The first project produced by Todd there is Gustav Holst’s The Planets, commissioned by RCA Selecta Vision as the first demonstration software for their new videodisc format.
• 1980: Creation of the first color graphics tablet, which was licensed to Apple and commercially released as The Utopia Graphics Tablet.
• 1981: Time Heals, the first music video to utilize state-of-the-art compositing of live action and computer graphics (produced and directed by Todd), becomes the eighth video to be played during the launch of MTV on August 1, 1981.
• 1982: The first live national cablecast of a rock concert (on the USA Network), simulcast in stereo to over 120 radio stations.
• 1982: The first two commercially released music videos, one of which was nominated for the first-ever Grammy awarded for “Best Short Form Video” in 1983.
• 1992: The first commercially available music downloads via CompuServe.
• 1993: The release of “No World Order”, the world’s first interactive record album on CD-i. • 1994: The release of “The Individualist”, the world’s first full-length Enhanced CD.
• 1994: The world’s first interactive concert tour.
• 1998: Launches PatroNet, the world’s first direct artist subscription service — predicts that someday “music will be sold by the pound”.
• 2016: The production of the world’s first full length concert shot with multiple Virtual Reality 360o cameras.
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