Digitization has a disruptive effect on a wide range of industries, from music to software to publishing to...you name it. If it can be digitized, it can be disrupted.
It's therefore encouraging to see the music seemingly converging on a cool new-old model: an ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, & Publishers)-like tax from one's Internet service provider that allows unlimited downloading of music.
Gerd Leonhard's recent presentation on the subject is the best I've seen yet, one that I'd recommend you review, even if you never stray from the software world to think about music:
Leonhard argues that digitization has made a control-based music economy impossible, forcing the industry to seek other ways to monetize music--ways that conform to digitization's abundance, rather than to the old idea of scarcity.
In a sign of things to come, the Isle of Man just approved "a single blanket fee (that) will cover unlimited download activity for all 80,000 or so...residents," as Ars Technica reports.
This follows a new trend toward "free" services, in which the music industry hides the cost of the music in the price of a separate service or device. It's oddly similar to trends I'm seeing in software.
This isn't the only model. As the Future of Music blog points out, some musicians, like Corey Smith, are finding that giving away music to drive more concert ticket sales can be a winning recipe. But while $4.2 million last year for Smith is a great return for an individual artist or band, it's not a great way to build an industry. I'd liken it to "lifestyle" software businesses that generate great revenue for their founders but provide little in the way of equity for other participants in the company's success.
So I think the "adoption tax" model is promising. The future is flat-rate: you subscribe, you forget about paying for individual transactions, you enjoy more music than you ever have before.
As reported in Friday's Wall Street Journal, the music industry has apparently given up on suing 13-year olds and dead people in its quest to stem music piracy. Instead, it plans to work with ISPs to identify and notify copyright infringers of the need to come clean:
[T]he Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
Cory Doctorow, among others, has sharply criticized such an ISP partnership in the past, but I see it as a big step up from the industry's current tactics, and one that could lead to other possible solutions like a music tax at the ISP level. TechDirt doesn't like this option, but it's unclear what other (good) options the industry has.
Throttling downloads at their source - i.e., the ISP that provides the bandwidth - is at least the right area in which to target the activity. Whether a tax or some other solution ends up working matters less than that the industry is now focused on the right piece of the piracy puzzle.
Warner Music Group has a proposition for U.S. universities, according to Techdirt: buy a blanket license to music downloads through file-sharing services, or be sued.
Techdirt thinks that this is a bad idea, and I disagree.
Techdirt's criticisms are clear:
It's basically a music tax--allowing the record industry to be lazy. Someone else gets to go out and collect all this money, and hand it over to the industry to distribute (or, actually, not distribute). It effectively sets the business model of the recording industry in stone, and harms better, more innovative business models by inserting the recording industry (and not the musicians) into a role where they don't belong.
But the benefits to such a blanket tax are also clear, as I wrote back in 2003. Consumers want a convenient way to pay for content. A tax levied by the ISP is a highly efficient way to ensure that the music industry gets paid, and that consumers don't get slowed down in their enjoyment of music.
Techdirt has some valid points, but it fails to identify the "better, more innovative business models" that would take the music industry forward, either in this article or in the others to which it refers.
Personally, I pay for my music, movies, and other media. But not everyone does, perhaps because they don't want to use iTunes or a similar service, for whatever reason. A minimal tax added to students' university fees would easily cover this, with little cost to these consumers and great benefit.
No, not every student would end up using the service, but that's the nature of a tax: sometimes you pay for others' benefits, not yours. In fact, that's usually the way it works.
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