lincolnkw | re: the downlaoding issue and the music industry

so I'm at work today reading The New Yorker on my lunch. (ok, I'm really looking for the cartoons! But!) They have an article on the making of a pop star and the music industry in genral and how illegal downloading has affected it. The article makes many valid points. Such as the music industry being extremely technophobic when it comes to new formats. The first thing they do is sue; it happened with player pianos, it happened when radio started broadcasting, it happened with CDs when they first showeed up.

I find this idea intriguing:

Everthing depends on getting people to pay for recoded music that they now get for free. When radiio threatened the music business in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the broadcasters agreed to pay a fee to the various rights holders for the music they played, based on an actuarial accounting system. Rights holders' societies like ASCAP administered those payments. Some have argued that a similar system should be adapted to the Internet, but many users would refuse to pay their share,and would go on taking music for free. it may make more sense to address the P2P problem with a government-imposed, statutory license, such as many countries in Europe impose on TV owners. Anyone with an Internet connection would be charged a few dollars a month, regardless of whether he downloaded music or not. that money would be distributed to the rights holders, absed on an online sampling system. As Jim Griffin, a former executive at Geffen Records and a digital-rights visionary, explained the concept to me, "You monetize anarchy. Charge them five dollars a month to be thieves."

I sort of like that idea. The record companies should also.

If you look at the number of people on Kazaa last time Iwas on (4 million-plus) and multiply by five dollars. Twenty million dollars. Multiply that by twelve months. Two-hundred and forty million dollars a year to be divided amongst the big five and the remaining ten-thousand independent companies and you come out to huge dollars. And that's just Kazaa, it doesn't count any of the other P2P networks out there. And those numbers were from a Thursday and not a big weekend.

Sign me up.

Oh yes, I only copied the one page so I have no idea who wrote the article, look fore it it's in the July 7th issue and is pretty good. I didn't know it could cost 500,000 dollars to make a CD from start to finish WITHOUT marketing costs.