Fairness and P2P music exchange
Submitted by infojunkie on Mon, 2006-02-13 06:10.
The issue of fairness in P2P music exchange is complicated. On one hand, it is universally accepted that the traditional business model of music labels is not compatible with the Internet. It is also universally suspected that it does not properly retribute the artists, and that it leads to over-priced products.
On the other hand, free-rolling file sharing completely bypasses both middleman and artist to let listeners find their music online, free of charge. The businessmen are fuming. But it is useful to remember that recorded music was originally intended as *promotional* material for the actual live performances, before the record made centerstage and the big-business marketing machine started manufacturing hits for profit.
Regardless of who's right and who's wrong, to my mind, the most important issue is fairness towards the artists: after all, they're the ones creating the value that we love. The middlemen will have to re-adjust. Here are a few ideas to redress the situation:
1. Focus on live music!
2. Give artists a cut from the ISP money. The bandwidth is where the Internet users are willing to pay. Start from estimating the amount of music traffic as a total percentage.
3. Set up an Internet donation-based system that goes directly to artists. I believe that the public will decide better than A&R experts who is valuable and who isn't.
4. Physical music packages should contain extra incentives for purchase: live music tickets, fan club material. The idea is to find stuff that cannot be digitized.
In light defence of A&R people!
I wouldn't let this comment go w/o a little interference, now would i? P2P & the Internet is another channel that connects artists to consumers (whether consumption in the monetarily sense or through listening). You could argue all you want that great music will find its listeners but that is IOM the exception and not the rule. Marketers' (I am excluding the ones that have infested the scene with boy bands and the likes) job is to facilitate the artists job in finding the widest possible audience. In turn, that will guarantee him / her the interest to go on (again for whatever reason the artist is after)
So, the solution is not cutting the middle man but charging the ISP . $.5 a song ain't much and it will probably stop clogging our hard-disks with useless tracks we downloaded because it was free!