The Music Tax

Via Mark Kleiman, an op-ed arguing for a new form of music compensation:

Turning to the arts, we find the British have recently reduced museum admission prices to zero. There's been no mass closing of museums, curators are not enslaved, the maintenance people still get paid for their work and paintings are bought from artists and collectors just as before, because the government pays everyone's "admission price." (Note that this principle does not lead to free symphony tickets. If I'm in a gallery and it's not packed, you can be there, too. But if I sit in seat 2, row F tonight, you can't.) . . .

What we need for music is analogous: a reasonably good assessment of how much play a given recording gets and a mechanism to steer public funds mostly to the ones people are listening to a lot. No amount of suing downloaders, or yelling about whether file-sharing is theft or music "wants to be free," nor any court proceeding, can create such a system. Congress must legislate public machinery that: 1) observes music use without compromising listeners' privacy and 2) bureaucratically steers a public royalty fund to creators according to how much their work is listened to.

Mark describes this as "an important idea here, which could be adapted to cover text and film as well." I'd prefer this to the RIAA's techno-dystopia where any technology that could conceivably be used by anyone, anywhere to listen to a song they haven't paid for (say I buy a copy of a CD, burn a duplicate to store in my car, and lend my car to my buddy who listens to the CD while driving and at the same time I listen to the original at home -- piracy!) is banned. But I'm not convinced we need to implement it, either. I think before we contemplate any departure from the status quo (which, I believe, includes the idea that Grokster, BitTorrent, etc. are legal) I would like to see something resembling evidence that the availability of P2P technology is leading to a decline in the number of people writing songs, forming bands, etc.

As I've noted in the past, the RIAA doesn't even try to argue that this is happening, instead offering questionable evidence that album sales by RIAA members have gone down as a result of P2P. This may be true or it may be false (the evidence, as I say, is ambiguous) but it's completely irrelevant one way or the other. In light of the very large number of people who form bands and play songs without any reasonable prospect of ever making money doing so, the opportunities for money-making by selling tickets and merchandise, and various other factors, I'm highly dubious that the spread of P2P will ever have an averse impact on the availability of music.

Film is another matter. Here it really is the case that unless it's possible for at least some movies to earn massive profits, an awful lot of the movies made nowadays simply couldn't be produced. On the other hand, buying a ticket to see a movie in a theater was already an extraordinary uneconomical mode of cinema-consumption before downloading became a possibility. It's something people (myself included) engage in as a social experience and because (duh) movie theaters have really big screens that don't fit in normal peoples' living rooms. It also seems to me that there's a large possibility for cable (or other telecommunications) companies to turn large On Demand libraries into profit centers.

But I'll happily concede that I may be proven wrong about these speculations. If evidence emerges that trends are pointing in a bad direction, then something like this model seems like a reasonable thing to move toward.