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?!?
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 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
' 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.
(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
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.
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
Will someone please give these clowns a clue pill?
*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
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 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?