Some sensible noises are being heard from one of the bigger names in the global recording industry
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080818-paying-for-music-has-become-functionally-voluntary.htmlJim Griffin consults for Warner, one of the four major music labels, and he sees a disturbing sight when he looks around at the digital music landscape.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." If our society can monetize music in a balanced, consumer-friendly way, the results will be awesome. If we can't... well, remember Chernobyl?
Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license.
He wants Warner and the other major labels to do this by making art "feel free" to those who enjoy it, even if it isn't. This fits well with the paradigm articulated later in the morning by technology lawyer Jim Burger, who argued that network filters, three-strikes rules, and legislation won't save the content businesses. The real answer to online piracy problems will be a market answer; if content creators want to succeed online, they need to focus even more on "seducing" consumers than on pistol-whipping them.
Its nice to see they are at last recognising that consumers are more than ready to provide that unlimited stream of revenue they crave at the recording industry, but it has to be based on a single premise in my opinion, a fair deal simply set out and offered without strings to joe public, this after all what the majority of the folks have been asking for for many years now and would be acceptable to those who have been forced onto the wrong side of the tracks by DRM, poor pricing, and poorly catalogued "archived" music that seems impossible to obtain despite being in the top ten etc in yester-year.
Give the public a simple product licence at a simple price and watch the otherwise "lost" revenues flow in, fans will still buy original disks and product paraphenalia so this really is the key avenue to follow, lets hope this new realisation spreads further than this PR announcement and makes music something people feel they are taking part in, rather than something that is priced so far up the chain that no one can afford to purchase it and great artists are never discovered unless you visit a music library.
If folks cant hear new music they most certainly will not pay for it, nothing the recording industry can say will alter this basic truth.
