Music 2.0
The Pay What You Want Argument:
I believe that any song or piece of music that achieves sustainable popularity and is recognized instantly by generations of listeners, regardless of how niche the audience is, would have been written and performed by the artist regardless of whether they got paid or not.
In fact, the best artists do their craft because they have to. A song writer writes and performs new songs for the same reason prolific bloggers write and publish new posts. It’s the internal need to express oneself to an audience.
A Solution That Might work:
A system that would take the middle man out of the picture and give the market back to the artist and the listeners would work something like this:
A) Labels and artists directly upload their songs to a common catalog.
B) The system itself becomes a registry of ownership rights. Every user who wishes to upload a song must be the rights owner for that song. Else, they’re liable to get sued for damages by the rights owner. To enforce the ability to sue for damages (if you’re dumb enough to upload a song owned by some label or artist as you’re own then you deserve what’s coming) anyone who wishes to upload a song must validate their identity by charging say the smallest amount that can be charged to their checking account, e.g. $0.01. This way the system knows the legal identity of the uploader and can list the person’s real name in their profile, which makes the uploader accountable for what they upload, i.e. they must have the legal right to publish/sell what they upload.
C) As the rights owner, you have the option to pay, say, $500 (which is less than the cost of suing somebody) to have an actual person (e.g. paralegal) verify that you own the rights to the songs you wish to upload. With this option invoked, any copies of your song uploaded to the system will be removed immediately (e.g. using fingerprinting.)
Note: So far, using this model, you can see that you don’t have to pay any 3rd party or wait ages to get your song(s) published.
D) Forget iTunes $0.99 model. Adopt Radiohead’s Pay-What-You-Want model. Set a minimum payment of say $0.01. So you can actually download 100 songs for a dollar if you want (here’s your 100X disruption) or you can reward your favorites artists with $2 for each of their songs and maybe go big and pay $5 for a song you really love from a band that you know could use the money. Money becomes more like a voting tool than money as you know it. The system can even rank artists on how much users pay for their songs on average. Or it can rank songs on how much users pay for the song on average. Again, money becomes a voting tool, in which case you’d want to set a max limit on how much users can pay for any given song, so it won’t become fiscally draining on the users to promote artists or bands they are passionate about.
The point is: let people pay what they want.
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Posted by Marc Fawzi






I believe that what Google has done (i.e. investing in Android and getting the FCC to mandate open handset/network requirement for the new “Block C” spectrum) is good for consumers and the industry. I don’t think they’re getting enough credit for it.
Open Social is another good initiative that they should get more credit for.
It’s interesting to see that when faced with overwhelming competition they end up doing what’s good for everyone. And where they have an overwhelming monopoly they aggressively consolidate their hold on the market (and the user.)
I’m very interested to see how they would compete against Apple in the mobile business. It maybe that they’re promoting Android to get Jobs to fully open up the iPhone to 3rd party development.
After all, what business do they have with mobile phones? They’d happily leave that to Apple, IMO, if Apple would open up their SDK and distribution model.