Dumping DRM
p2pnet.net News:- “… if you swear that you`re not going to listen to any music, you`re not going to pay. It`s going to be very hard for you not to pay, and the network is keeping an eye on you to see you don`t download any music. And if you do without a license, we`ll sue the hell out of you – because you`ve been offered a cheap deal like the TV license.”
The subject is dumping DRM.
Good idea? Not if you’re going to replace it with a music tax based on UK TV licensing, continues Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington (right).
Ex-Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner is a respected figure in the music industry and, “he gets the ball rolling by saying the big labels are ‘fucked’,” says the story, going on, “That`s an easy way to win over the crowd these days, who generally see big music labels as the antichrist.”
According to Jenner, the labels have “raped their whole business model” chasing short term profits. But then he goes off the deep end, wanting the government to step in and save them with a mandatory monthly tax in the European Union on broadband Internet and mobile phones of around â¬4 (about $5) a month.
The tax would allow consumers to download all the music they wanted without DRM, says Arrington in Techcrunch. “Payments will be made to rights holders according to popularity of music – if a song is very popular, it will get a higher percentage of total fees collected.”
If you live in the UK and own a television, you’re forced to pay a tax of £131.50 (about $250.00) a year, says the story, adding:
“The BBC gets these fees – how they spend it is broken down here. The BBC literally has vans roam around the country trying to determine if people who don`t have licenses are watching tv in their house, and there are big fines if you are caught without one. In 1995, 235 people were jailed for not paying the TV tax.”
However, Arrington thinks it’d be a bad idea to legislate a tax, “that gives the music industry guaranteed revenue, and guaranteed profits, while simultaneously removing their incentive to innovate and serve niche markets”.
In fact, “Asking the government to prop up a dying industry is always (always) a bad idea,” he states, adding unequivocally:
“In this case, it is a monumentally stupid, dangerous, and bad idea.”
Also See:
Techcrunch – Replacing DRM With A Music Tax Is Incredibly Stupid, November 19, 2006
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November 19th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
This is a BRILLIANT idea. DRM goes to hell, and artists get paid. Music labels would have a BIG incentive to provide the public with the sort of innovative stuff they want – if they didn’t, nobody would download it and their share of the compulsory licence revenue would drop. Compulsory licensing has made cover versions of songs workable, why can’t the same work for distribution of songs?
November 20th, 2006 at 1:05 am
How is the popularity of a piece of music determined? How is it calculated? How could these popularity figures be manipulated in favor of certain bands? If traffic monitoring is used, how will provacy issues be resolved. This sounds like an idea that stinks to high heaven.
November 20th, 2006 at 10:15 am
“How is the popularity of a piece of music determined?”
The public performance collectives say they do this. I say they do it by ficticious record keeping and even more fictiocios sampling of what is played on radio.
Besides any popularity of a piece of music (song/musicians/artists) is not, most of the time, not natural. It is the product of payola and advertisement and the popularity of the performer (good looks, good show, good dancing, good payola-press) and plain chance, none of which has to do with the innate quality of the song/musician.
Plain chance is why a worthless song in a CD that sold 10 million copies will make about US$ 1 million in song royalties, more royalties than made by most great songwriters in their lifetime.
Clearly a new paradigm is needed for determining the value of a music piece so that songwriters and musicians and atists are paid for their work in a logical, quality based fashion. After all, if copyright was invented as an incentive, it should be to incentivate the gretest talent, not the non talented, as at present.
So, the question is not “How is the popularity of a piece of music determined” but how its greatness determined.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
November 20th, 2006 at 10:41 am
This is similar to an idea I suggested here: http://p2pnet.net/story/9435
There has been a lot of bashing of the UK TV license fee, but I think most of this stems from the fact that it’s not a progressive tax: You pay the same if you live in a 20-bedroom mansion with a set in every room, or a shared bedsit without two pennies to rub together. I believe in equal access to culture, so my proposal was to make the tax means-tested, and incredibly cheap for low-income households. It should also be voluntary.
The other main element of my idea was for funds to be distributed *directly to artists*, based on a catalogue of freely copiable recordings (ie only those available without DRM would qualify). Actual mass of files downloaded by listeners would not be a factor, though the fee admins would need to check for fakes and disambiguate mis-named files. I can’t see the point in paying money to labels, which is what’s being discussed, as they are no longer required as distibutors of music; though I can see a new kind of enterprise starting up, helping new artists in exchange for a percentage of their income from the fee.
We can argue about the details, but I would basically support this kind of measure provided the money goes directly to artists, not to labels, and provided we are henceforth safe from prosecution for sharing music.
November 20th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
This is a crap idea. There is no way of monitoring it because of the large number of P2P networks out there.
Also the artists won’t get paid. They never get paid when industry bodies are concerned as those bodies are purely there to serve the labels who don;t want any more getting out of their paws.
So not only would artists continue to get screwed by labels but this would also be another way for the independent labels to get screwed as well.
Rince
November 20th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
“The other main element of my idea was for funds to be distributed *directly to artists*, based on a catalogue of freely copiable recordings (ie only those available without DRM would qualify).”
The general idiea great.
But the part as to how artists would be paid will require a great deal of participation, though and analysis. There are possibly many options, but each ,ay have a weak point that will do injustice to a class of artist (songwriter, singer, musician, arranger, ets) by leaving them out altogether or wrongly weighing their contribution to a recording.
The part about leaving out the record companies is magnificent. In the new digital world, these actually are an impediment to distribution rather than a contributor. After all, their specialty is retiring old recordings so that the new ones have the least market competition.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com