Free Music that's Legal to Share
An expanded Royalty System to make Music File Sharing Free and Legal
Dec 15, 2008
Listening to music on the radio, TV or streaming is currently free, however downloading the same music from a peer to peer network and playing it offline is considered stealing. Imagine a world where it was perfectly legal to download mp3s and artists still got paid, not for how many units they “sell”, but according to how many times their songs are actually played.
The traditional definition of theft involves the unlawful taking of someone else's property. When talking about digital “property” such as mp3s though, the question becomes “what is actually being stolen?”.
Digital music on the internet is not a physical product like a record or a CD, but an exact copy of the original. When someone steals an apple, it leaves the original owner without that apple. However when someone steals a digital product they're simply copying it. What is actually being “stolen” is the potential income it has to offer in the future. This income is what really needs protecting.
Performing Rights Organisations
What type of system could better reflect the reality of online culture, including peer to peer networking? Perhaps Performing Rights Organisations (PROs) have part of the answer.
While record companies are still in a phase of fence-sitting about unpopular Digital Rights Management (DRM) models, the PROs have been addressing their own issues of how to keep track of different types of airplay, including online streaming for their members.
Royalties
One thing practically everyone agrees on is that artists should be paid. The PROs are good at this. They collect royalty fees from radio and TV stations, clubs, restaurants etc (anyone that uses music) and are remarkably efficient at distributing it to their members.
Expanded Royalties
But what if everyone that owned a computer, mp3 player or ipod was to pay a small amount too? The most played artist's revenues would increase substantially and their music may not need to be sold to make a buck. It's not a completely new idea when you consider television licenses in the UK, where a yearly fee is payable if you intend to watch or record programmes as they're shown on TV.
Alternatively, a music licensing fee might be included in the purchase price of devices and therefore completely transparent to consumers. Next-generation devices would need to be equipped with technology to keep track of song ids and offline number of plays, uploading them to a PRO or similar organisation when a connection to the internet is available. Of course, digital copies of the music itself would be free and legal to share.
The Future
At the end of the day this would probably mean less fame and fortune for the big players and a more even distribution of royalties based on real data. Maybe there'll never again be a single band as big as The Beatles, record sales as big as Michael Jackson's Thriller, or world tours as extravagant as U2s. In this day and age though one might wonder, is that such a bad thing?
