Make music sharing on the Internet legal

For the last 8 years, the music industry is trying to control digital music, using different technologies/ attempts like DRM, CD protection, broadcast flags, lawyers, etc. This has not bettered the situation, but has brought the music industry a fundamental and detrimental crisis, value destruction, squashed innovations, and so on.

Compensation Not Control Music 2.0 Gerd Leonhard Midem Net 2009

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Companies selling music, such as Apple with iTunes, have started to sell music without DRM – partly because of the competition (Amazon is more and more successful in selling music that is open) and thus through the buying power pressure from customers who found out that this magic DRM server holding the rights to use their music might be turned off sometime (see article). Apple, being “nice”, even offers a possibility to remove the protection for as little as 30 cents per song (that is “only” about 30% additional cost) which persuaded me to stop any music from them after I once have taken a deep breath and converted my purchased songs. (Apple lives forever? Sometimes “forever” is approaching pretty soon ;-)

Back to the topic: as demonstrated in the past with copy protections for computer software, the music industry is fighting a battle they cannot win but it looks like they still have not understood that. One possible solution that has been around for a while but never really left the ground is a music flat rate. Some time ago, the Isle of Man is planning to offer a flat fee to all of its internet subscribers to cover the cost of downloading music – the price discussed is GBP 1 per week.
Taking this idea further to a global level, this would have tremendous influence on the way music would be marketed and companies like Apple with iTunes would have to find new benefits for the customers in order to get them paying something.

An intermediate approach would be to use the already installed surveillance systems that track down pirates to collect numbers about download rates and spread the collected flat rate money according to actual download figures – a more expensive but maybe fairer approach.