“Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users,” Frank Rose reports for Wired.
“In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by [consultant on digital strategy for three of the four major music labels] Jim Griffin, one of the idea’s chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that’s shared online,” Rose reports. “‘It’s monetizing the anarchy,’ says Peter Jenner, head of the International Music Manager’s Forum, who plans to join Griffin on the panel.”
“Griffin’s idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers — something like $5 per user per month — and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels. A collecting agency would divvy up the money according to artists’ popularity on P2P sites, just as ASCAP and BMI pay songwriters for broadcasts and live performances of their work,” Rose reports.
“In a 2004 white paper, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called for it to be applied to file sharing, but the Recording Industry Association of America immediately dismissed the proposal,” Rose reports.
“Things are different now. ‘The labels are beginning to like the idea of an access-to-music charge,’ says Jenner, who once managed Pink Floyd and the Clash, ‘because they’re increasingly aware that their current model is broken.’ U.S. music sales, which peaked in 1999 at nearly $15 billion, dropped to $11.5 billion in 2006. Last year’s figures are still being tallied, but with CD sales cratering and online sales overwhelmingly dominated by singles, the only question is how far they’ll fall.”
Full article here.
The music industry’s current model is not broken, it’s being fixed — by Apple. The old model was an illusion. The music cartels grew fat on artificially inflated profits from CDs because they overcharged for bundles (albums) for years.
Massive amounts of undeserved revenue is a broken, unsustainable model that the marketplace will eventually correct. Now that people can buy music a la carte and choose exactly what they want and not be forced to pay for music they don’t want, the music cartels think something is broken. The only thing broken is their stranglehold over consumers.
Now that they actually have to develop product that consumers want to buy, instead of forcing people to buy a load of stuff they don’t want in order to get a few good nuggets, they’re shocked. “Hey, where’d all of our free money go?!”
Well, too damn bad. That extra bundling cash is gone forever, boys. Now you have to work for your money. Imagine that.
Next up: The cable companies who massively overcharge consumers for bundles instead of allowing their customers buy only the channels they want. They’ll be shocked, too.
As for the main issue of this article: trying to correct the issue of the theft of music, should ISPs – meaning all of us – have to pay a surcharge for piracy?
There is no way for the ISPs to determine what your getting. Suppose you stream audio or video legally – thus pure bandwidth usage is not a good metric. The only way they would be able to charge those who are pirating is to actually see what files people are downloading. This would open up issues of privacy. Anyway you cut it the consumer is screwed. MDN nailed it on the head the record industry business model is broken…Get rid of DRM and allow people to purchase music and do with it what they will.
@middilay
I’ll take you seriously the day you learn to correctly spell ‘bane’.
For everyone else, this is ridiculous. I say, if it’s allowed, we collectively sue the pants off of our ISPs.
@Gabriel: 25-30 second samples are the musical equivalent of buying junk candy at the check-out line ; “Ooh, that looks/sounds good, think I’ll take that!” Thirty pounds later, you realize just how much crap you’ve consumed.
FreddyThePig@: You are correct, sir; also, the second word of a sentence is usually not capitalized.
$5 to freely download/pirate any damn thing i want? Sounds pretty good to me. That’ll fill up the Time Machines/AppleTVs real fast!
So by this phiolosphy the people that don’t steal music should have to pay for and b/c others do. NICE! way to stick it to everyone!!
correction: philosophy. sorry about that. i “proof read” the post as it was being posted and realized i totally goofed on that, lol.
So I’ll still be forced to pay for music I don’t want and don’t own because the music cartels think something is broken. Morons! Don’t you get it yet? I don’t buy your stuff now because I don’t want it, not even for free!
This is the same thing as a fee on blank media which was rejected by Washington. This is much and more costly, Why should my ISP charge me a fee that will benefit the big record companies? I buy and pay for indie music from indie artists. Sound Exchange (one of the RIAA’s other hats) already screws indie artists by collecting fees on their music and then refusing to pay the indie artists. This is just a reaction from consults and the big recording industry executives seeing their gravy trains running dry. If the Recording industry signed good artists and treated them fairly and kept their money grubbing fingers and noses out of the artists creative business. Instead of making recording Artists celebrity, they should be worried about the Artist making the best recordings possible.
The artists will never be compensated even a penny of the money from an ISP pay fee to recording industry scheme. It’s just another face on an industry that can’t and won’t do what is need to stay relevant in the changing modern times.
I for one as a music lover do purchase all my music and do not steal it. I just don’t buy label artists’ music I prefer indie artists, artists’ with a view point, a passion, an edge, a real person, and not a fake, drunk or drugged out celebrity that a hobo wouldn’t waste time over.
This proposal is essentially the same idea that the labels have been pushing for as long as I can recall. A tax on blank media. They’ve tried to propose it with audio cassettes, MiniDisks, CDRs, iPods and even Zunes.
Once in a while they manage to find a compliant government ( such as Canada ) who can be persuaded to go along with it, or a desperate manufacturer ( such as Microsoft ), but it’s an idea that has never worked and never will.
It’s just wishful thinking on the part of the labels and like most of their silly ideas, it will have the opposite effect to the intended effect. If people are paying a piracy tax, then paying for legitimate downloads is pointless.
They are running out of ideas.
@FreddyThePig — whatever – so there! I don’t think you would know how to download music legally or via bit torrent. I have some advice – don’t buy an iPhone – goto:
http://www.jitterbug.com/
thats the phone for you…so THERE you go…
I would like to apologize for my previous comment. I was trying to give a perspective of the potential infringement on all of our rights. Instead I was duped by an “old fart” do to a grammatical error. Thank God I have an Electrical Engineering degree and a graduate degree in telecom, and going for a Phd in computer science. I may not know grammar but one day “old fart” you will use and pay for something that I have made…
Don’t forget the $8 surcharge for the movie industry, and the $6.50 surcharge for the TV industry,
While we’re at it, let’s get rid of paying for shareware – just add a $5 surcharge for that, and the obligatory $10 Microsoft surcharge (no one knows why we pay them anyway, so just fork it over),
Now add in taxes on the surcharges, and a higher bill from your ISP for handling all the surcharges,
Hey, my broadband bill just went to $150/mo so I can check email and surf the web a bit. Grandpa and Grandma will love that!
It’s a great idea letting some group that’s known to be shady, collect money on someone elses behalf, so they can get extra money, that’s mighty charitable . . . to a piece of fruit, but to a human with a brain, don’t be surprised if the charitable group has a
‘the buck stops here’ sign on their desk.
@eliga,
You make an excellent point, and it’s kind of where this article boils down in my pot. Obviously the music ind. finally got somebody with a calculator to attend their meetings and figured out yet another way to keep their fat cats on payroll thanks to someone else’s work. (60/40 splits and expecting the artists to act like their lucky.)
If ISP’s are going to be charged this – tax, then you can be sure we’re going to get charged, and long story short – $5/month is an outrageous return for the so-called music industry. They’ll make way more money per song then they’ve ever made… This is a truly terrible idea. Remember the cassette tax? When that format was popular the “music industry” was raking in the dough. I believe it was something like 1¢/recordable tape. Sounds small, but in principle I was always against it because it was a private industry being given the right to tax privately owned distributors, and ultimately me.
When I started reading the article I was imagining perhaps 50¢, which, arguably, the ISP’s could just absorb if they wanted to, but $5 bucks – no way… (I guess I already said that.) If you ask me, this is just another strong-arm and payback tactic being proposed by the music industry.
I’ll say honestly that if my ISP bill goes up by five dollars a month I’m going to feel perfectly justified to just go ahead and stop actually buying music at all, and to just go ahead and torrent it. Heck, for 50¢/month the temptation could become a reality. The point being, that this same feeling, felt and acted upon en masse (which I believe is justifiably probable), will surely bring the house down around online music stores, and voilà, 100% payback for screwing with their finally tuned fat cat assembly line will have been dealt.
As much as we love to hate the industrial music machinery, let’s not ignore the fact that they have a lot of practice protecting their turf – It’s clear that things are not going to be the same, but let’s not for one moment underestimate the industry’s ability to be militantly underhanded. I for one would like to continue to pay for my songs one by one, with the option of buying complete collections at a small discount. I think that almost anything is better than letting this industry presume to levy any kind of tax directly on the end user.
My wish is that all artists would remove themselves from the proverbial “music industry” paradigm and just go ahead and direct market through stores like Apple and Amazon, or if you like subscriptions (which I don’t) then pick a subscription based service.
Now back to TV… I wait with baited breath to see if TV is learning anything or if they too will just rest on their laurels until they realize we’re not watching off-air as much anymore, and we’re starting to drop our cable and satellite subscriptions.
Isnt Capitalism wonderful?
It allows the idiotic notion that some must have more cash than they will ever need and some must have less than none, that is, be in debt.
Yet we continue with it because its ‘freedom’ or some such tripe.
Isnt it time to see that there is something wrong with this system and not pick at pieces of it?
Taxing the peasants is what all this is about, because if you have enough money, then extra costs dont bother you.
ONLY poor people actually pay tax, or surcharges, because rich people can afford it without even thinking about it.
Get it?
“– and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.”
Not necessarily in that order.
What a joke.
The Labels should be careful what they wish for. This would be a tax. A tax collected by government.
A government that never saw a tax it didn’t like. A government that would charge a handling fee and income tax on these found funds. A government that would not allow any write offs on those ill gotten gains.
A government that would oversee the distribution of those funds and make sure the song writers, music composers, musicians, performers, technicians and retired music industry workers and creatives all get their fair share.
There would not be much left over for The Labels.
The Labels in Canada are not in favor of this tax at all.
They know they wouldn’t see much of that $5.
Music Cartels, Oil Cartels, Drug Cartels
Why don’t I see any differences…all will screw you royally!!
How about a surcharge to Walmart to make up for lost revenue from people who buy CD’s, rip the songs and burn copies for friends.
If we surcharge the ISP’s because they are the delivery method for online music, we should also surcharge trucking because they are the delivery method for CD’s.
“As for the main issue of this article: trying to correct the issue of the theft of music, should ISPs – meaning all of us – have to pay a surcharge for piracy?”
I am sure that the majors assume that each pirated track is revenue lost and try to determine their price based on this. However, I do not believe that all or even most tracks that are pirated would have been paid for otherwise. Of course, that is just my opinion, based on a very small sample size of friends.
“Thank Jobs, we’re now entering a new golden age, when people will realize that the only music worth listening to are the big hits.”
I fail to see how selecting any song you can means only hits. For pop acts and the like that previously only had 2-3 good tracks or “hits”, that might be true. But good acts that put out 10 tracks of goodness will remain the same.
“Gee it would be a real shame if…”
How about if Jim Griffin sends me $5/month for being gracious enough to not break his kneecaps?
Afterall, if what he’s proposing is not extortion, then neither is what I’m proposing.
-hh
Really, if this goes through, and I am forced to pay for music, does that mean I’m allowed to download anything I want? Sounds like a good deal to me.
I’m not against the subscription model, I’m against DRM.
resently read an interview with the piratebay on torrentfreak. they suggested that the music/movie industry/rights companies start their own add supported bittorrent sites and pay artist from that revenue. personally, i think this would be a better way to go. a surcharge would just be another tax on services; which we don’t need.