"To license Napster according to a radio mentality - minimal cost to the
broadcasters in exchange for great promotional value - would undermine any
lucrative future for artists and songwriters."
Noah S.
You should not be dismissing this overall formula so quickly. Artist's DO
get paid token percentages along with that great publicity distribution
radio provides. What might that artist compensation percentage formula be
on the Internet? The size of the thing outweighs any radio station or radio
network by quite a bit. You not only have the ability to ACCURATELY track
everything that is played (unlike radio) but you also have a potentially
very different scale and volume in effect. Don't throw away radio
experience as "old fashioned" or non-lucrative thinking because it's
niether.
Radio's mechanism remains the LEAST damaging compensation mechanism for art
we, as a culture, have ever come up with. It BOTH compensate creators and
frees the art itself from use control by its provate owners. Drawbacks? I'M
SURE! But a new body to collect these play fees for the U.S. Internet
specifically - not some business extension of BMI or ASCAP - but take what
we have learned there and design it for the Net specifically. Basically, it
would all be tabulated by file transferrence software used by the
participating sites. Lump sum periodic collections from websites, accurate
artist compensation (and even website rebates?) according to all actual
downloads/streams/or any form of send at all.
If your final question is, "How Much?" The answer is NO ONE KNOWS. But
think of how it saves the free music that the Net is now known and loved
for from going back under the yoke. We can play with copyright all we
really want to on the Net (we can also play with copyright in radio
transmissions too, but we hardly do at all for some reason) but the FIRST
law that get's enforced on the Net is the one to register with this
collection agency if you are transferring OTHER'S IP with or without their
permission, with sliding website fee scale varying by actual traffic.)
One (1) law and some common software would at least get THIS form of
compensation (never enough!) going and prevents no others. If it
(non-per-unit tolls) usurps everything else in popularity, and satisfies
artists who perhaps no longer have record labels to pay for the privilage,
so much the better for all of us. (Always a scare at the end!) Except when
you remember how this worked to benefit both the spread of music and the
businesses that were spreading it in the medium of radio.
Are we any more stupid then the recording industry that was suddenly
confronted with free music on the radio? Are we any smarter about how human
ingenuity adapts to perceived loss in no time as it turns it into greater
success. Some website should just keep replaying a loop of all those Jack
Valente actualities from the 70s, his calm rants to TV reporters when he
was fighting the spread of VCR technology. They're really classic
grifter-like stuff, but let's just call it pure misguided imagination now
looking silly, even as it remains an understandable argument, over and over
and over again...
DJ
Negativland
>on 2/24/01 9:04 PM, John Parres wrote:
>
>> "I think you lose some sales, but you're building awareness of the artist,"
>> said Kedar Massenburg, chief of Vivendi Universal's Motown Records. "The
>>more
>> your awareness of a record, the greater your sales."
>>
>> "If it's not being bootlegged," he said, "it's not a hit."
>
>That Napster may have contributed to the 38.8% offset in single sales is an
>indicator that public attitude to music consumption is beginning to shift.
>People have begun to experience music as a service (in Napster's case, a
>terribly flawed one - creators were not paid) and some prefer it. As the
>services get better and become more plentiful and bandwidth increases, etc.,
>consumer preference will shift and CD sales will decline.
>
>In the very near term, there can be a case made for the publicity value of
>bootlegging; spreading music around raises awareness and, in turn, CD sales.
>But imagine a world 10 years from now - a world in which music service, or
>more appropriately, media service has become the predominant method of
>consumption. To be prepared for this future, we have to ensure that
>creators will be remunerated by these services as if these services are the
>*only* method of doing business.
>
>To license Napster according to a radio mentality - minimal cost to the
>broadcasters in exchange for great promotional value - would undermine any
>lucrative future for artists and songwriters.
>
>I believe the future is interactive. I know the future will be very
>different than the present. The fact that many in the industry (well
>articulated by Massenburg, above) are firmly clutching onto the "packaged"
>vine does not bode will for their readiness to swing to the "service" vine.*
>I am concerned that terrestrial-centric licensing of online services will
>sellout artists' futures.
>
>-Noah
>
>*Tarzan Economics� is a registered trademark of Jim Griffin.
>
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