Slashdot Mirror
Support Grows For Blanket Music Licensing
Anti-Globalism sends in Ars coverage of a speech by Jim Griffin, who is a consultant for Warner, one of the big four music labels. Griffin is encouraging dialog on the idea of blanket licensing of music — a topic heretofore more likely to be heard from the EFF or the Barenaked Ladies. "Taking music without paying for it may not be 'morally voluntary,' Griffin says, but he admits it has become 'functionally voluntary.' No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.' So Griffin's job is to help Warner monetize digital music, and he's convinced that the issue of payment for music is nothing less than 'our generation's nuclear power.' Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license; essentially, bringing the collection society model to end users. In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme."
Under blanket licensing, how do I reward artists with good music preferentially to those who suck? Frankly, any business model that has talented artists like Radiohead, NIN, etc earning the same amount or less than crappy acts like Britney Spears is fundamentally broken. I will not give one penny to those talentless pop stars.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"Our generation's nuclear power?" Seriously? You're comparing finding a way to sell music with SPLITTING THE ATOM?!?
In other words, the amount of money paid towards works will "liberate" that work for public consumption and the money will go towards the artist to create additional works?
Twinstiq, game news
Lets call this what is really is, an involuntary forced payment to one of the most evil and hated organizations in the country from many people who have absolutely no interest in downloading bad low quality music at all and never will.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Confucius say "Companies who invent terms like 'collection society' never bring good dishes to pot luck."
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
At least one of the labels is seeing what the future holds: The end of the major music labels.
With an "ISP Tax" they can maintain their businesses as a more or less useless parasite on society, getting large amounts of income and still holding the power of saying who is to become a star and who is not.
Another problem is the small, independent labels, not to mention musicians who manage without a label. Think they'll get any money? Think again. The major labels have decades of experience lobbying government, so who do you think will end up administrating this?
It will also require registering and logging what music is downloaded, which will be a hard task in itself... unless music on the internet is centralized.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I'm finding myself in the same boat, but for a different reason. All it will take is one pointy-haired exec to look at this model and think, "We're not getting paid enough!" Then that label pulls out of the 'scheme,' bringing countless songs into legal-limbo. It sounds like a great idea, conceptually, but a lot of logistical wrinkles need to be worked out before I consider it seriously. Great pipe dream, though.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
I'm looking forward to playing improvisational jazz on the lids of garbage cans and raking in the money from their big pot o' cash.
What about me? I don't want to pay any sort of music tax. I spend maybe 20 hrs per year choosing to listen to music of my own volition and all of that is from music I purchased in CD format ~10+ years ago. I don't download music and I don't listen to music radio, why would I want to subsidize those who do?
-Billy
Fine and dandy, as long as I've got the option of not paying the fee and not getting access to the music. I don't care for most of the stuff the major labels put out, and I'd rather not pay for something I've no interest in getting. If I want music from them I'll pay for the items I want, thank you very much.
' No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.'
Really. Because I'm pretty sure that almost every society on the planet Earth has had art, knowledge, and culture work that was for several millenium, if not longer. I'm reasonably sure nobody paid the guys who made cave paintings. Art, knowledge, and culture - the REAL stuff, as opposed to, say, Brittany Spears and the line, are produced by volunteers in their spare time. They do it because they have a burning passion to do so, and financial considerations tend to be secondary, if not tertiary.
"In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme."
Haven't we already voiced loudly what this kind of shit leads to?
music gets their cut,
tv demands their cut,
radio demands their cut (because everyone records the non-music time),
movies demand their cut,
video games demand their cut,
book publishers demand their cut,
magazine publishers demand their cut,
news sites demand their cut,
etc etc etc, repeat this for EVERY possible industry.
And don't forget, they'll START at a "reasonable" fee. But then every year or two bring it to court saying "that's too low, the market's grown and so should the cost!" and "inflation!!! we need to increase the price to keep the same value!!!" and before you know it that reasonable (let's say $5) fee, has grown to $25 in the course of 10 years, and continues to grow at that rate forever. (See the canadian's blanket tax on CDs/cassettes/etc)
Nobody can afford internet anymore due to the collective $500/month royalty charges, america goes offline. (or bankrupt... and then offline.)
Meanwhile, they'll still find ways to rape you in court if they can.
I prefer my ISP to be like a utility, and not a content provider. And if history tells us anything, most other people do too. Remember AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy all had their own exclusive content, but in the end the consumer didn't want to pay for that content, all they wanted was a link to the Internet where they could choose their own content.
I Heart Sorting Networks
I have said it before, and I will say it again.
I am not going to pay a monthly fee on my internet connection or anything else to "excuse" me for all of the copying I don't do.
I don't download music, I buy music. I buy a lot of music -- this year, about $800 on CDs so far, most of that from 3 record labels, and not mainstream ones. The artists I listen to aren't covered under your Brittany-where's-my-panties-Spears tax, and aren't on those labels who are trying to benefit from this.
The last thing I want to see if some *(&^%(*& monthly surcharge on having an Internet connection to help offset the losses to artists I don't listen to.
Everybody who proposes one of these surcharges really needs to be fed their own head in very small pieces, because it's a stupid idea, doesn't address the issue, and won't be paying the artists I listen to. It basically is an attempt to have their revenue stream guaranteed by law.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
(1) They have a guaranteed, mandatory monopoly forever.
(2) And they don't have to produce anything anymore.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
This looks like a pretty interesting (dare I say, good?) scheme to get us consumers to actually pay for the music we get off the web. However, the problem I'm feeling from it is that this is still very label oriented. What about musicians who want to make a living off their music online but don't have a label? How do they get involved?
Another sticky wicket would be dividing up the cash in the pool for the artists. A good point had already been brought up by a poster to whom I replied earlier. How can we consumers use this system to benefit the artists we like, and avoid lining the pockets of those we don't? Is there some kind of download tracking? Registration (or other tracking) of songs? And then, do all artists get the same share of the pie, or does it vary based on number of plays, actual play time, or some other scheme?
If the questions get ironed out, and this is something which can be opted into (as opposed to being unilaterally fobbed on us) I wouldn't mind paying a bit extra each month to support my favourite acts. But only if the concerns about how it works are answered.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme.[emphasis added]
If we're going to be paying our ISPs royalties on top of what we already pay them, then they'd damn well better not unreasonably throttle or cap our traffic, and they should give us specific bandwidth and/or data limits instead of slimy "magic mystery numbers subject to change and nyah nyah we wont tell you what they are" contract clauses.
It also depends on how many labels participate in the "scheme"...as in, "all of them". I want more than music from the Humble Christian Rock or the Polka Plus! labels.
Exactly.
This isn't trying to be friendly to consumers, and work out a common ground.
Instead, it's music execs trying to figure out how they can continue profiting from mediocrity, while also making it even more difficult for independent artists to find an audience and be compensated for their work.
How do you think this is going to work? Most likely, the pool would be divided among the RIAA member companies, and allocated based on the artsts whose music got played or downloaded more. Considering that they are going to be the same artists that are going to be promoted by the RIAA, and the same artists whose music will be forced into my skull through paid arrangements (do we really deserve the punishment of hearing the same song on the radio 20 times per day?).
Under such an arrangement, RIAA can just deposit their "proteges" into the playlist by paying the radio stations, and then proceed to collect 99% of all money from the pool, which will then be allocated by them - 99% to the company, 1% to the artist... and only a few artists are going to see that 1%. In other words, the system will be even more skewed and broken than it is now!
Let us ignore all the various government intrusions that try to subvert the real market laws: supply and demand.
When you have a limited supply of an item, and some demand, the price tends to go up. When you have an unlimited supply of an item, and some demand, the price tends to go down.
Music, or any content that can be distributed digitally, can have near infinite supply. The price, in such a case, may fall to zero. Some people will have some "moral imperative" to paying the original artist, but in reality the current distribution does NOT pay the original artist. Look at how the coward monopolists at BMI distribute royalty license fees.
There's a great catch, though, and one that I've used to help small bands make a pretty decent buck: find out what you have that can be sold in limited supply.
For musicians, their live performances are always going to be in limited supply. The music, since it is infinite in supply and has a value of zero in terms of quality between licensed and unlicensed copies, should be a marketing item.
Make your money the way most of us here make it: by doing new work for new customers. Your old work, as ours, is a great portfolio tool to attract new clients. Once you've gotten the clients' attentions, offer them value added items. Instead of hoping to get $15 for a CD that they can download for nearly nothing, offer an autograph session and only autograph your CDs. I own an offset print shop, and we can do custom CD runs for almost nothing. Sell collector's items, autograph them, and you've got a valid limited-supply product. Sell limited-run T-shirts. Offer personal time for your wealthy fans to hang out back stage, at a fee, or even offer online or IRL lessons to groups of fans.
A person's pay is not for work they've done in the past. No one pays their plumber a license to flush their toilet. No one pays their plumber a fee when they use the plumber's tactics to fix their own toilet again. Past work is relatively worthless if it can be mimicked by others, easily.
Copyright only exists today because of the momentum of it. It is dying a quick death. There are artists out there who moan and complain about it, but they're the ones who just can't see the forest for the trees: writing music, creating drawings, etc, is no different than going to plumbing school. Your labor of creation is the lesson time you spend to figure out a way to sell your future labor. Write a song, learn to fix toilets: they've both education. YOu don't get paid to learn to fix toilets, you don't get paid to write your own music. Both steps take you to the next level: finding customers to sell your services to.
It's called subscription music services - like Rhapsody and Napster. Keep it voluntary. I don't like the idea of having to pay the RIAA protection money to access the internet.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
Honestly, I've no interest in iTunes are any music store, their selects are always more limited than you find out there in torrent land. iTunes has a decent selection although I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole as the interface sucks and is highly invasive to a Windows machine adding a number of other services.
Then of course there is the problem that the library is difficult to move around, the whole plugging an ipod into a Windows machine wiping the ipod if you're a mac user primarily. Lots of little stuff Apple did either intentionally or unintentionally made it annoying. There is also the fact that it does nothing that I couldn't do with Audiogalaxy and Winamp way back in the day when Napster was just starting out and not on the RIAA's radar yet.
Now contrast all that BS with any random torrent site and your favorite music player on any platform and you see why people like p2p so much. There's also the fact that it is easy to download a few thousand songs off p2p, if you do that with iTunes have fun looking at your bill. It doesn't take long to rack up quite a bill.
Look at Kevin Nealon as an example, that guy bought 300k (his exaggeration) in iTunes and doesn't even back it up. It's easy just to click another song and spend another dollar.
Indeed. Do people with hearing deficits get a refund? Or do they have to subsidise others?
To me, this sounds like they're re-inventing the radio license fee, but without having to provide extra programming paid for by that fee.
Or like charging everyone a high yearly library fee, and then expect people to build their own library buildings and populate them with books. Um, sorry, no, I won't have it.
For a fee to be useful, the record companies would have to produce something for the fee. Set up a library I can access, and keep it populated. And those who do not read or listen should not be forced to pay.
from people who still don't understand how the fundamentals have changed
recorded music is now nothing more than an advertising vehicle for artists. if some old timers have a problem conceptualizing that, imagine the business model of radio: it gave music away for free in order to sell ad spots and create buzz. got that? apply that concept to recorded music now. welcome to present day reality
artists: no more coasting on royalties. you'll have to do regular work, concert gigs, to make a living like the rest of us mortals, or be spokesman for advertisers. you'll still be disgustingly rich and get lots of blow jobs from eager female fans. i don't exactly empathize with your plight of losing royalties
distributors: the internet has replaced you. you can't compete with free, sorry, enjoy your extinction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think you're overstating here. This might be perhaps the end of multi-millionaire rockers, maybe. But file-sharing wont be the end of live shows and merchandise. So there's still plenty of revenue sources for the artists.
If by "professional musicianship" you're referring to the top-40 detritus on MTV and Clear Channel, let's hope you're right. I certainly wouldn't want to preserve that system with a federal tax.
I have a revolutionary idea! Maybe we can go back to people making music they love because it's what they love to do.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Will someone please give these clowns a clue pill?
No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.
That might be true for things like sculptures or books or theater tickets, but that's only because all those things are scarce and have a marginal cost to produce. If I can take all the books or paintings in a physical store home with me without paying, then yeah, that's probably not going to be workable. The marginal cost of a digital music file (or movie, or ebook) is basically zero.
*Again*, this is the same buisness model as radio royaty, and public TV in the country where it exists.
People pay a fee, the audiance of each artist is measured using polling (TV audiance is not exact), and then you give the money according to that repartition.
Last time this was discussed, I was modded into oblivion for simply pointing that the majors were changing their stance on this (before, they hated it). We'll see if slashdotters have smarten up on this.
Look at how different p2p statistics and box office are for some movies: this would be a better system, because at the very least the medium is not controlled by the guy who sells the stuff. Also, no more bullshit about causing 10,000$ dammages for one song.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
I have some direct experience with blanket music licenses, and they work well.
Churches are big users of music, both traditional and modern. They have to deal with issues of duplication and performance rights for 6-10 songs, every week. The level of effort needed to clear copyrights song-by-song would be impossible.
Ten years ago, the Church Copyright License was created, representing the catalogs of 120 publishers. After one year, they had 9,500 annual licensee holders. They now have over 170,000.
The churches pay a very reasonable annual fee, and get blanket permission to reproduce and perform any songs in the combined catalogs. There are sensible limits on what can be done legally, all basically to the effect of limiting the use to a normal church service.
A random sample of licensees are sent an audit form each year, and they record all the music they've used during the past few months. CCLI also provides software to do the accounting work, so the audit can be completely automated if the church wants.
Payouts to the copyright holders are done in proportion to the usage audits. The payout ratio is very fair. I know several song writers and performers who receive royalty checks, so I know the system really does work.
I've written some hymns myself (New Hymns for Worship), and have looked over the CCLI contracts in detail. They look pretty clean (but IANAL). Although I ultimately decided to publish under a Create Commons license instead, if I had wanted to make money, I would have definitely signed up with CCLI myself.
So, blanket licenses can work. They don't need to be expensive. They let consumers roam freely through whole catalogs of music. It's a good model.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
If the downloads aren't encoded in a lossless format, and if Time Warner expands their bandwidth metering trial, then I'll be sticking with CDs thank you.
CDs are not a lossless format - They're sampled at 44.1 kHz and digitized at 16-bits. DVDs do a little better. But the only lossless format is live and unamplified.
I realize that you were probably just saying that your minimum quality standard is what's available on CD, but some of the lossy formats are damned close and I'm convinced that most people who complain about compression effects in high bitrate lossily but intelligently compressed music are just experiencing psychosomatic effects and probably couldn't tell the difference between the compressed version and the CD. (Some audiophiles with super-human hearing that have trained themselves in what to listen for may disagree.)
It's all about deciding for yourself what level of lossy is acceptable under the circumstances.
Now that all that's out of the way, most of the streaming music services fall short on this front and do not meet my minimum standard of quality on the music they deliver. (If somebody has a suggestion of a service that really delivers, my ears are wide open.) So, for the time being, I mostly just listen to stuff that I've ripped and (lossily) compressed from my CD collection (fairly large and almost all acquired used back in high school). This 'blanket licensing' thing, assuming the same level of streaming quality I've experienced with the services I've tried, would really do nothing more for me than provide a mechanism for previewing music that I may want to acquire later. And, given that it would all be RIAA stuff, I'm not sure I'd find many gold nuggets while mining through it...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art'
So charge for concert tickets, t-shirts, trinkets, datastream subscriptions, and so forth.
No, no... a blanket music license would cover performances of the "Linus and Lucy Theme."
"No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture. [...] Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license;"
Wait. Voluntary payments don't work, so here's a voluntary payment scheme?
If you globally replace "society" with "recording industry" in the article, then statements like
become correct.
I guess I missed the part where society is critically dependent on the recording industry.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Blah blah blah Warner consultant blah blah blah mandatory payments to Warner blah blah society cannot otherwise survive blah blah blah here's my invoice.
If record corps just used free distribution of music to promote the live concerts, T-shirts and other physical transactions they can actually control, and licensed hits to cross-promote other merchandise like in commercials, they'd have an excellent business model. Without the arbitrary overhead and guaranteed profits (despite terrible business work, and mostly terrible "art").
Just admit that the record contract and sales model was a ripoff from the start that could last only a century, and harness the power of fans directly promoting the products they can sell. And stop insulting us with claims that "what's good for Warner is good for America".
--
make install -not war
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Even if most music is rubbish. If all companies agreed to it and we received decent versions (ie preferably something like a 256 bit rate mp3 or better) and you can opt in and out of it then yeah why not?
If the system is fair then those who have more of their music listened to would receive more money which sorts out shit artists but unfortunately also under appreciated artists.
First of all, it's blanket schemes like this which have allowed the existence and/or assured the continuation of the various music mafia groups -- RIAA (particularly in its SoundSource guise), ASCAP, and BMI to name three.
Second, these blanket schemes often seem to somehow get manipulated to benefit not those who are better, or even more popular, but those who are best connected
Third, where they do benefit those who are more popular, they do not do so proportionally; the superstar gets an even greater portion of the spoils than his superstardom should indicate, and the little guy gets not the little bit he should but nothing at all.
Fourth, they ain't called the music mafia for nothing -- they're known for their shakedown tactics. With this, in addition to shaking down small restaurant owners with the temerity to host a band, or anyone with an IP address, they'll shake down ISPs as well.
And finally, why the hell should I, as a person who does not listen to music, pay for you music-addicted freaks who can't put your iPod (oh, excuse me, Ogg Vorbis compatible music player) down for 10 seconds without withdrawal pains? You want music, pay for it yourself; you've got no legitimate claim on my money.
...then only artists would get money for music!
That would utter KILL the music copyright industry.
It's hard to know if the music copyright industry actually serves the interests of the artists. It is unquestionably true that the massive marketing muscle of the music copyright industry makes marketed artists "famous." And it unquestionably valuable to the artists. But where the problem begins is where the artists compensate the marketers by assigning [exclusive] copyrights to their music. Marketers have a right to be paid, but I have to disagree with their right to sue without the approval of the artists.
To that end, I don't believe copyrights, and especially the rights to sue for violation or infringement of copyrights, should not be transferable. If this were to happen, I believe sanity could be restored to the whole problem of the industrialized copyright where a copyright can extend to 99 years after the death of the artist ostensibly to take care of the families of the artists which we know is utter crap since it is not the 'families' but the copyright industrialists who are collecting the royalties on copyrighted material. So while the duration of copyright is still tied to the status of the creator, it is still all about the copyright holder, more specifically, the copyright industrialists who aren't creating anything at all. This goes well beyond the intent of copyrights which, as far as I understand it to be, intended to allow an author to benefit from his works exclusively for a limited time. Instead these extensions of copyright are serving and is in fact the basis of the copyright industry.
And while many artists dream of becoming the next "big thing" I would argue that they don't deserve it. The best art has always been for the sake of good art and should always be for that reason. There's nothing wrong with being the next "big thing" if it happens to go that way and your work merits such recognition on its own. But the damage caused by the marketing muscle of the copyright industrialists has also caused the truly deserving to be ignored by thrusting the likes of B.Spears or whatever the current bubble-gum-pop-artist-of-the-day may be. So now the copyright industrialists have succeeded in creating an environment owned by them and controlled by them, and the price of admission into their world is that they must own everything you create... your life's blood. (Prince learned this all too well didn't he?)
So much of this whole issue could be cleared up by taking away the ability to transfer copyright and leaving it, and derivative works forever in the hands of the original creator. Would their still be a "music industry?" Yup! There certainly would. And would they find ways to keep abusing artists? Most likely. But when the right to sue is removed from the industry and placed squarely in the hands of the artists, I think we would see a different kind of industry emerge... and one that would be a lot more friendly to the fans. (Imagine how the public could turn on an artist the moment a lawsuit is filed against a fan... the fans would fall away and "fame" would become notoriety and disappear.)
Why is sanity so hard to achieve and so easy to lose?
Sean Kennedy's great sci-fi radio novella Tales From The Afternow follows your basic wanderer-traversing-the-post-apocalypse-wastelands story line. But it's not the apocalypse part of the story that makes your hair stand on end.
Before the apocalypse the major media conglomerates created a joint discount card. Use your discount card and you get 75% off retail. See a $10 movie for $2.50. Buy a $20 DVD for $5. MP3s, books, magazines, paintings, it applies to nearly all media.
Of course everyone signed up. Two years later the card becomes a legal requirement. Want to see a movie? Download music? Watch TV? Get a book from the library? You need your card, otherwise you're locked out. If you commit piracy, your license is revoked and you're cut off from all media.
In the totalitarian post-apocalypse world, the license is required for anything involving information, and any unregulated use of information is illegal. Private ownership of a microphone or a camera is illegal. Speaking English requires the license. "There used to be a time people could sing openly without being worried about licensing. There used to be a time when you'd be able to a read a book or tell a story. Of course the books are gone. And you can still lose your license by telling stories. Its dangerous business being creative."
Just sayin'.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Companies like Warner really shouldnt be surprised that people place no monetary value on music when they themselves are pumping it out at such low quality/high quantity that the actual value of it is not far off a flat zero.
The present system financially rewards the moronic and supresses meaningful creativity through the demand on musicians to whore themselves. til that is fixed its pointless people standing around scratching their heads wondering why people arent paying for music.
No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.'
When I go to the Symphony, and listen to "Pictures at an Exhibition", I'm voluntarily paying to listen to a piece that I probably have half a dozen copies of already.
Is the logic here that the symphony isn't culture, or that it's not art, or that it's not civilized?
...it is probably a camel's nose for a compulsory scheme wherein all Internet users would pay a "tax" to the RIAA.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Sorry, no. Modern music is crap because the music industry operates very differently now than it did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s. Any good music that's out there doesn't get publicized by the big labels.
What I'm seeing these days is that teenagers are listening to the music I listened to as a kid, because the music of their own generation is crap.
In a way Canada already does this.
For some time now Canadians have been paying a fee on every ipod, on every piece of digital media (CDR's and DVD-R's etc...) due to the supposed copying of music. These fees were then supposed to go to the Canadian version of the RIAA, which would then in turn disperse the monies to the artists.
That is my understanding anyway. I wonder how that is working? I wonder if a single cent has ever made it to the artists themselves, or if this has just been basically filling the lobbyist's war chest for lawsuits and paying off political officials.
By my tone you can probably guess how I think it will turn out.
I am not sure these blanket schemes are the way to go. Perhaps if the wording was stronger and the enforcement more profound, then perhaps.