Music industry watch
Collective licensing is good for music industry, bad for artists
Now that Jim Griffin and Warner Brothers are pushing collective licensing, I feel compelled to re-state my feelings about collective licensing. Let's boil it down to this:
Collective licensing solves a tricky legal problem, but creates an uneven playing field for artists.
At first glance collective licensing seems like a perfect solution. You have ISP's take a little money from users and then give that money to the music industry. Then money should flow to the artists to compensate them for "lost sales" due to P2P traffic. The keyword here is should.
If you go and sue P2P downloaders and get money from them, that money should flow back to the artists, right? Well, that's not happening. The artists haven't received any money from the RIAA & Co -- remember the music industry is full of rat bastards.
But, lets give the "music industry" the benefit of the doubt for a minute. Now consider this uneven playing field:
Record label sources said corporate bosses are still deciding on how best to split the money. In determining the payout, they said not every artist is owed money and it must be calculated with regard to the level of copyright infringement for each artist.
Just how do you intend to measure the infringement to pay artists? Given that the recording industry has proven itself completely incompetent (intentionally or otherwise) I don't trust them to do this right. Figuring out who deserves what turns out to be a hard problem fraught with many perils, unless you simply put the music industry in charge.
From everything I've learned about the music industry, they relish opacity in their accounting. Labels commonly hide behind numbers in obscure contracts which prevents artists easily asserting their fair share. The artists lose this struggle because they have to fight for money tooth and nail (with lawyers and accountants, who cose $$$).
The labels would love to have a spout of money turned on and poured directly into their opaque accounting cash cow. Little if any money would ever come out and then only the big artists sucking up to their labels will see any cash. The rest gets squat.
This makes life for indies harder and harder -- unsigned artists get infringed on just like signed artists, yet with this system the indies would never see any cash. Collective licensing could put the big labels back on top with an ever firmer grip on the music industry -- it would have the cash to squash the edgy Internet labels and Music 2.0 companies. The quality of music would continue to go down and the prices would still be kept high.
Ugh. No thanks. Please let the free enterprise and our legal system figure out the best approach! I feel that we're getting close to striking a realistic balance between the needs of fans, artists and the labels.
Say no to collective licensing!
Posted by Mayhem at March 28, 2008 12:21 AM
