I've had an idea stewing in my mind gravy for a while now that I think could be a pretty cool solution to the whole music industry fail whale thing.
I call it CopyCarrot. As in, the industry has tried the stick, now they should try the carrot. The basic idea is that you embed info in every bit of digital music (MP3 files, CDs, etc.) that contains a standardized link to the artist's PayPal account, or whatever they prefer--it shouldn't be tied to any specific payment gateway, and allows you the music fan to pay them whatever you wish for that song or album or whatever. There's no obligation, there's no digital rights management (read: restriction), just a link that allows peoples' music players to tell them, "Hey, [artist] made this. Care to throw a little money their way? (Yes / No / Stop Asking)."
It would then be tied into your iTunes / Amazon / PayPal / whatever account so that kicking the artist a buck or two would be extremely fast and easy. Obviously consumers would be able to choose if they wanted that tied together or not, it would be up to them and the software / music player they were using.
Of course many people wouldn't pay, and some people would even strip that info out of the songs they passed around the 'Net just like they do with any sort of DRM that the industry tries to add now. But I bet 2 really important things would happen:
1. Enough people would pay enough money for the music they loved that it would make life noticeably easier for artists, and it would do it with no middle man. And really, making it just a little easier for the artists would go a long way.
2. Most people would leave the info in there because it wouldn't restrict their ability to listen to the songs, and it wouldn't even nag them if they told their music player to stop pestering them about paying for their music. In general, people think artists should be compensated, and they respect systems that leave them in control of that decision. It's only when the recording industry middlemen try to impose a bunch of restrictions on how, when, and where they listen to music they have paid for that consumers try to circumvent those restrictions. CopyCarrot imposes no restrictions; it only adds information.
Software that reads this info could be configured to ask people to pay every time they start playing something new, or every X months, or every time they play a song Y+ times, or never. It could also show them what they've paid for, and what they haven't, and nifty graphs showing how much they've paid which artists, per track, per album, etc. Or how much their entire collection is worth vs. how much they've paid. But the point is, it doesn't treat fans as criminals. It recognizes that sharing music is not only a social good (it's not stealing when no one has lost anything, and great art should be shared), but also that spreading the art around helps the artist when it contains a handy link to pay them for their amazing work.
And then obviously you could start doing the same thing with movies, books, images, software, and any other kind of digital media. Artists could also offer promos to encourage people. Like, "Pay me $25 or more for my album today, and I'll get you into my next show in your town for free!" They could also embed other info like their Twitter account or their Last.fm page and then music players could link you straight to those things. It would be a direct artist-to-fan-to-artist circle of love that made everyone happy and gave fans great music and artists money in their pocket to eat food so they can make more great music. Awesome.
And then lastly, and this would be the coolest part of all, it would setup a dynamic where it was in the artists' best interests to encourage their fans to send their music far and wide, to as many people as possible, via whatever systems they prefer. The more people get those MP3's, the bigger the pie from which X% of them will pay the artist an average of $Y per track.
I think this would be pretty great. One of those things I'd like to leave my day job for awhile to go work on. But what say you, dear readers of my bloggity blog?
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3 comments:
Hmm... quite an interesting idea. At some point in my life I studied internet law and legal regulation of the music industry, and I retain some level of interest in the topic.
On a practical level, I'm not sure enough users will actually contribute via the "copycarrot" (nice name, by the way)to make a difference, though most agree in principle that artistes should be properly remunerated.
I remain of the opinion that a fixed broadband/computer tax to cover the inevitability of digital downloading is a good (though not very popular) way to go. I say, add the tax to broadband packages and computer equipment, then stop spending time and money chasing down online pirates.
Having said so, I'd just hate to be the politician responsible for taking that decision...
@David Page - Thanks for the comment, David. Glad you like the name. That was my favorite part too. ;)
If you'll humor me, I'd like to deconstruct something you said a bit. You wrote, "On a practical level, I'm not sure enough users will actually contribute via the 'copycarrot' ... to make a difference, though most agree in principle that artistes should be properly remunerated."
How much is enough and how much of a difference would it need to make to have a real impact?
Here's how I think about it: I work for a non-profit doing online organizing. Part of that work involves fundraising online. Some organizations run their whole operation (more or less) with just what they can raise online. It's pretty reliable to look at the number of people you can contact on your list as P, and assuming you can package a compelling fundraiser campaign, you can get X% of P to donate $YY dollars each, totaling $ZZZZ. Multiply that by how many fundraiser campaigns you can do per year, and that's your income. If you can do good work w/ that amount of income, you do it.
Here's another example: Open source software has challenged the notion that people will only produce consistently and with quality if they are compensated at a fair market rate, or the rate of compensation that people in that industry have traditionally enjoyed. Many open source software contributors make no money from what they do, and yet they produce quality software consistently. Certainly this is a minority of the people in the open source software community writ large, but the community is large enough that you still end up with a large number of people doing good work for little or no direct compensation. And obviously when you do start throwing a little money their way, you only improve the situation. But you do not need to pay them a six-figure salary, even though that's what their contributions may be worth in a traditional proprietary software company. At some level, it's a labor of love.
I think the music industry could work very similarly. There wouldn't be huge record deals being thrown around anymore, but there will be *some* money available. You can look at how many fans you can reach as F (getting bigger and cheaper w/ the Internet, obviously), what percentage X of them will donate what amount of money $Y, and then do some math and that's your annual income from your music $ZZZZZ. If you can live with that, you keep making your music and putting it out there. And you spread it as far and wide as you can to maximize the value of F.
Right now there are people who would pay some amount of money for the music they obtained for free, but there is no mechanism to allow them to do that. In non-profit fundraising circles, we refer to this as "leaving money on the table." When an industry is crashing and burning, they should not be leaving money on the table.
So the goal is not to duplicate the status quo via a different model, but rather to allow music (or art or media in general) to be made and disseminated and for at least some people to be able to make a living that way. It's not like it was easy to do under the old system either. :)
Perhaps a good follow-up would be to actually crunch some back-of-the-envelope numbers on this and see how viable it would be for artists.
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