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."

But some artists suck.

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.

Re:But some artists suck.

It's just another form of taxation. I don't want my tax dollars going towards the "war" but it's going there despite the fact.

Re:But some artists suck.

No, this isn't taxation, which actually pays for services.
This is protection money, plain and simple.

Re:But some artists suck.

Delicious ironing? That sounds... painful.

Re:But some artists suck.

It's described as voluntary. As in, you can pay X to the companies which join the scheme, and then get carte blanche to download music. Or you can just not bother, and continue to buy music from the specific artists you prefer. If it was mandatory, then it'd be pretty dubious.

Re:But some artists suck.

It's just another form of taxation. I don't want my tax dollars going towards the "war" but it's going there despite the fact.

Exactly. It would be a tax. That is why I oppose this. Unless the government is collecting this money, not everyone is covered. I do not believe it is the role of government to ensure the health of a commercial entertainment industry through taxation. Why does this country dislike socialized programs for the protection of its citizens, yet encourages socializing the support of whole industries? I thought this was a capitalistic society.

The solution is simpler

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.

Everyone else sucks, but not me.

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.

Just another ploy

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!

Like on radio?

*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.

Re:But some artists suck.

I don't see how either mandatory or even voluntary reporting of the music I personally listen to can be considered a 'bast case' scenario.

I would rather see a system where the release of a music recording is sold (rather than a copy). For example, a band records a studio album and goes on tour. They price the release of the album at 100,000 tickets. After they've sold their 100,000 concert ticket, they release the album to the public domain. That's just one example, artists that don't tour or perform live would have to come up with other mechanisms.

Re:But some artists suck.

I think it's going to go the same route as wedding photography. In the old days, the photographer would shoot your wedding for a small fee or even free, but you had to pay like $20-$100 per print for the pictures. When scanners and color printers became widespread, people just started to make their own prints from the proof sheets. For a while the photographers tried to do things like print "SAMPLE" over the proofs. But now most of them have switched business models. They give you the prints (or a CD) at cost or even for free. But they charge you a substantial fee for shooting the wedding.

If you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than the old way. The cost to the photographer is not the prints, it's the time, effort, and equipment used at the wedding and in post-processing. Once those costs are paid, they can run off as many prints as they want for almost no cost. So all that's happened is that the cost for the customer is now more closely aligned with the cost for the photographer. I can see the same thing happening with music, where most of the artists' revenue comes from live and commissioned performances. The music itself would be distributed at minimal cost or even for free as advertising for the performances.

Error: Persepctive Missing.

"Our generation's nuclear power?" Seriously? You're comparing finding a way to sell music with SPLITTING THE ATOM?!?

Re:Error: Persepctive Missing.

Think 60s anti-nuclear protests. It's our generation's nuclear power issue because of the hell raised on both sides of the fence.

Re:Error: Persepctive Missing.

How are people living close to a reactor site being screwed? Did you know that more radioactivity is released into the environment by the average coal burning plant than the entire nuclear industry in the US? Did you know that more people die from industrial accidents in coal power plants in one year in the US than have ever died in Nuclear powerplants (of any cause, including natural) combined with deaths caused by nuclear accidents?

Nuclear power is many tens of times safer than the default energy production method in this country. And using Feeder-Breeder reactors, they could be 10 times safer and more efficient yet.

There is little that annoys me more than people pandering to fear of nuclear energy based on their own ignorance.

There is no greener and safer energy than nuclear (I would note that solar energy is a kind of nuclear energy).

Lets call this what it really is

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.

Confucius say

Confucius say "Companies who invent terms like 'collection society' never bring good dishes to pot luck."

Labels only

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.

Voluntary payment

' 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.

And Then...

(1) They have a guaranteed, mandatory monopoly forever.
(2) And they don't have to produce anything anymore.

Supply and demand: a recap

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.

Re:Supply and demand: a recap

I couldn't disagree more. The thing in limited supply, and in high demand, is the musician's creativity - writing melodies that people like, expressive lyrics, cool guitar solos, interesting arangements, new instruments used in a different genre, etc. That's what I'm paying for when I buy music. The fact that copies of this creativity cost $0 to duplicate and distribute does not mean that the creativity itself is worthless. *That* is what copyright law was establish to protect. Everyone here on Slashdot justifies illegal copying by making quips about the poor quality of music, lack of creativity, etc., but that does not give anyone the right to take it for $0. The course of action in those cases is to not buy it.

amazing solutions

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

It's only taken them TEN YEARS!

It's only taken them TEN YEARS to come up with what Napster tried to hand them on a platium platter a decade ago-and they responded then by suing them out of business. Now 10 years later they're slapping themselves on the back for coming up with this original idea?

Will someone please give these clowns a clue pill?

Blanket licenses works great - a good model

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 [ccli.com] 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 [newhymns.org]), 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.