Sounds like something that Steve Ballmer would dream up mid rant.

Whilst the music industry are at it, no doubt the Beast of Redmond would want Dell et al to pay Microsoft $5/month so we can use Windos?

Why don't we get invited to parties like this where they sit around smoking banana skins and coming up with ideas like this?

Shoe polish? Whatever they are on I really really don't want any.

>I guess they'll destroy themslves just to try to go back to the glory days.

Too right. It's like the old joke about the Irishman captured by cannibals, who inform him he will be killed, his flesh eaten and his skin turned into a canoe. He is asked if he wants a last request, and asks for a fork. Puzzled, the cannibals nevertheless give him a dinner fork, whereupon he starts stabbing himself with it all over the body, screaming "You're not making a f***ing canoe out of me!"

RIP music industry.

This idea is actually the brain-child of Rick Rubin, who is now "co-head" of Columbia Records. He was hired to make the major record labels popular with the public again. He announced this concept several months ago, at the same time he said that even he thought record labels were treating customers crappy. At least the idea is sort of innovative, something record company's haven't been too good at lately, maybe it will work...

"It's no secret the labels are less than thrilled with Apple's vice on the online music industry."

This meaning of vise is spelled "vise".

What the labels are proposing is offering music for free (as in -beer, not as in -speech). That is, the end-user will not have to pay directly for the downloads -- yet, they still won't have any control over the music files, just the ability to listen to it in the player to which they downloaded it (perhaps even for a limited time, who knows).

It is obvious that they still don't "get it": most users who download music are not doing it because they refuse to pay any money for it, but because they can do whatever they want with the files, and play them, freely, anywhere and anyway they want. This is the reason why CD sales still exist: people still see the value of paying for music, they just want to be able to share it and copy it, and play it in their various devices -- in essence, they want to *own* the files, and feel some sort of entitlement towards their use.

Maintaining the price of CDs high (or deluting them with crap to make a buck) does not attract many people. And offering DRM-laden music files gratis may not be enough to bring the customers back.

-dZ.

Another problem that the scheme totally fails to address is equity in distribution of profits to the artists. Not that this is a concept that the major labels have had any real concept of before, so perhaps nothing changes. When a consumer has to pay for each individual album or tune, they are forced to prioritise and will choose to purchase music from those artists they really like, whilst passing over those that are only of passing interest or perceived to be or poorer quality. Thus the market rewards the better (or really more popular) artist. If the music is free after a fixed price subscription this model starts to fail. Sure more popular artists will be downloaded more often, but there will be a great deal more downloading in general. It becomes impossible to separate the latest mega-hit that is played incessantly by a customer from something that was downloaded, played once and discarded. In many way this might actually still be a good thing, the concept of the mega-artist that rules the airwaves, as we were subjected to in the decades gone, was not great. A much more level playing field may be a generally good thing, but one suspects that the current crop of mega-artists may be less than impressed with the dilution of their royalties stream.

I suspect that the major labels are very much aware that they are dying. But knowing that and going to their shareholders and saying "we are screwed, might as well just shut up shop, sorry, shares now worthless" isn't exactly going to endear them to those shareholders. The guys in charge have a legal obligation to protect their shareholder's interests, they are required to do whatever they can (legally) to discharge this obligation. The peanut gallery simply saying they are stupid and should go away to die misses the point. Not a shareholder? Really? Checked your superannuation/pension/mutual fund's holdings lately?

This is a really hard problem. DRM isn't useful, at least not in its current form. The old glory days model of the industry was always broken unless you were a mega-artist or a major label. A model where artists make their real money from performances and merchandising only works for performing artists, and doesn't help those artists who create recorded works that are intrinsically impossible to perform.

Of course the single major issue that the recorded music industry face is nothing to do with downloaded music. Their glory days were a time where they were the only form of entertainment outside of direct to air TV. Now they compete for the attention of the populace for both time and money with games, home theatre, the internet - and the burgeoning social networks, and most importantly, mobile phones. That and the fact that most of the music that the A&R folks have signed and decided are the next big thing have almost universally been crap.

Common feeling seems to be that a consumer subscription model would be the most appealing. But unless it fully addressed the mechanism by which artists were rewarded it also is doomed to failure. The time when each time your iPod is docked, it phones home to report the tracks it listened to may not be too far away. Building a viable and internationally workable system like this, one that works with each country's individual recording rights, performance rights, and composers rights organisations, in a manner that addresses all artists equitably, makes the efforts Apple went to to get iTunes running look like a walk in the park.

Of course this bright idea has one tiny flaw.

There is no way that Apple will play ball with this, so unless Universal et al can convince A LOT of people to get a new MP3 player, they are pretty much screwed before they've even begun.

Then factor in all those people who don't like a subscription-based service (i.e. your music isn't your own, and will vanish when you stop paying).

This sounds more like a Microsoft style vapour announcement in order to force Apple's hand than a real business plan.

Free? Hah, the manufacturers will pass those fees right on to the consumer. So even if we don't want to use the "free" service we will still be paying for it!

The UK uses vice for both the American words 'vice' and 'vise'. I believe the American is historically more correct (if you go back to the origins of the words) but 'vice' is correct for a UK publication.

"This would need to be managed by a nonprofit "

Of course such non-profit artists agency organisations already exist. Typically there is one per country, although the roles are split three ways - the artist, the recording artist, the performer (and no they are often not the same people.) Trouble is that these fast become unaccountable private fiefdoms. Being non-profit only means they don't return a profit to shareholders. But handling a lot of money on behalf of artists, for which they charge a service fee, means that they have their snouts well and truly in the trough. You can imagine that the directors of such non-profits don't ever travel cattle class, and largely set their own salaries.

One might guess that the current artists organisations are trying to make it clear that come the day of controlling the Internet cash flow, they are the guys, and not any upstart newcomer. This probably explains a large part of the the behaviour of the RIAA - because it is one of those non-profit gatekeepers.

"otherwise there would be a lot of temptation for the big labels to include only the artist they heavily promoted or invested in, making the labels (and not the consumer) the entity that decides which artist we can listen to."

Exactly. This is precisely the return to the golden age they want.

The original record labels were financed by the mobsters. The musicians worked the clubs, then when recording first came along it was expensive and the only people who had any money were the mobsters who owned the clubs, could afford to buy the recording equipment and pay for the distribution channels. Things haven’t changed in 90 years!

Never downloaded a track from any service, never will

I much prefer buying the CD and copy it into itunes.

there's just something inherently wrong about downloading tracks from people like Apple or the labels themselves

hell, support your local retailer !!

Tesco's ftw £7.98 per album kicks arse ! (and i can choose what format to copy it as, lossless or MP3, it's MY choice !)

If the manufacturers will be charged $90 per device assuming a life of 1 1/2 years, they're going to pass it over to the consumer and increase the price of the device to cover it. And since I don't spend that much on music, I'll stick to what I have, thanks.

Ned, I am with you 110%. The extra ten is that I use a freeware utility to rip my CDs to MP3 before adding them to my iTunes library. I guess the chances of the next iTunes update adding some sort of cripple-ware are quite small but in the end only the paranoid survive.