An Immodest Proposal for the Music Industry

[Music Industry City]

Google news threw this in my feed. The author, Doc Searls is pretty good with articles in other industries, but this one has quite a number of faults. With that in mind, there are always some ‘ideas’ that can come out of it from an economic standpoint.

Take a look and let us know your thoughts.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/immodest-proposal-music-industry

Some of my main issues stem from the lack of understanding of how the industry works and knowledge of the associations within.

You can see why IFPI no longer gives its full name: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

IFPI is the acronym and has always been associated with the full name – a quick search found a 2001 logo that is just IFPI.

His focus is on the ‘value gap’ then proceeds to start from the Recording side and introduces stats from the live side by trying to link participatory experiences from the live sector to the recording sector. Apples & Oranges.

His premise is the jukebox model.

In no case, however, does the music listener pay for digital music on the jukebox model: with cash on a per-listen, per-song basis. (Note that a dime in 1960 was more than 100x what a streamer pays for the right to play a song for somebody.)

So that’s my proposal: create an easy way for any of us to pay what we want for the music we hear. This will give music lovers their own way to close the value gap—and then some.

Then, he discusses EmanciPay – part of a project he runs at Harvard. Read the article to see the full details.

EmanciPay turns consumers (aka users) into customers by giving them a pricing gun (something which in the past only sellers used) and their own means to make offers, to pay outright, and to escrow the intention to pay when price and other requirements are met. Payments themselves can also be escrowed.

An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay one cent for every song I hear on the radio”, and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies I wish to pay for songs I hear over the course of a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to”—and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing.

He says “every song I hear on the radio”. This is simply a miss, because radio is different than digital – for sake of argument, I believe he means stream – which there are statutory and non-statutory licenses in place for digital – another commonly confused area. Also, radio only pays the songwriters, so again – let’s ‘presume’ he means digital radio, or digital streaming (Pandora is different than Spotify).

The jukebox and live performance examples both suggest that people shouldn’t have a problem saying “I’ll be glad to set up a way to pay one cent every time I hear music I like.”…
Apple just bought Shazam, which is a way to identify music people hear. That kind of functionality can be brought into standard ways people can pay for music they passively hear (for example, in a restaurant or at parties) and like.

I’m not completely following this…is he saying people are willing to pay for hearing music in a restaurant? Which, any type of public performance (bars, clubs, restaurants, et al.) are required to pay a license to the PROs, and if they are using Pandora, they need to comply with Pandora’s terms of use and set up a paid business account and Panora should be paying the public performance fee. There’s plenty of variables for public performance that I won’t get into due to the sake of length.

What are your thoughts on the article?

• This topic was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by Music Industry City.

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