Tomorrow’s music business requires a legal foundation with enforceable regulations that provide a path to predictable and reasonable income streams for both creators and business’ so they both can continue to innovate. The current system is too complicated to enforce and has created a culture of uncertainty throughout the world. I urge this administration to take the lead in creating world wide solutions that can fairly and simply compensate creators while encouraging business’ to expand. I am very concerned that the US government is going to fall short of protecting intellectual property by “fighting” Piracy with unenforcible laws.
(I added this for my blog) I’m not entirely familiar with the concept of one royalty rate and I believe it’s not necessarily the best solution but its a new approach that has a chance of being enforceable. I believe that songs are still getting to millions of fans yet few are selling more than 100,000 before piracy overtakes sales. It seems natural for humans to share what moves them emotionally and emotion often takes over common sense. So, not making an excuse, emotion can make you want to share a song without thinking that the person receiving it is not paying for it. Try this: if we used existing technology to track file transfers worldwide and ISP’s paid a small royalty for the file transfer, then artists could be paid for the dissemination of their intellectual property. So a song that got transferred a million times with a royalty of .10 would make the artist $100,000. I’m working these numbers with absolutely know factual knowledge of how many times a popular track gets transferred. But I’m thinking that the numbers don’t sound too bad and in a world in which fans knew that a small portion of their ISP subscription fee was going to the artist, there would no longer be a piracy war and artists could continue to create content.
I hope somebody who really knows this stuff reads this blog and tears me apart. I’m very interested in learning more here!
If look at today’s music business landscape as if a nuclear bomb was dropped on the comfortable little monopoly that dominated the last half of the century, the present unfocused scramble for domination starts to make sense. We are presently in the part of the mushroom cloud where every aspect of the business is rolling over and over itself. When the explosion subsides, nothing about the music “business” will be the same. The cockroach hiding under the rock IS Direct to Fan and the direct patronage of music. Consider these practices the only defense. I’d go one step further to say that we are also seeing fallout effects on the stronger population of “old school” business’ giving birth to abnormal mutant offspring that look scarier then their parents. When it’s all over, the landscape will have been wiped clean of the music business as we knew it and what shows up in it’s place will be a model that looks absolutely nothing like what we have seen before.
