This month’s issue of Wired magazine proclaims the end of the music industry. Everything they say is true: the current RIAA business model pits the record companies against customers and musicians, and is longer functional. Customers are too jaded to blindly buy the next juicy single or the album that goes with it. Musicians who don’t conform to the juice of the day are left unsigned and unnoticed. Industry execs are aware of customer’s immunity to the usual marketing ploys, and turn up the volume on the same ploys. This sets off the next cycle with a set of customers even more skeptical and resistant.
Music industry execs do really love music. There is nothing they would like more than to make money off of a new quality music phenomenon. They have only their business model getting in their way.
File-sharing technology being the last nail in the coffin, the good news is we can turn to technology to get us out of this mess and put a new business model wrapper on the need for music in our lives. Some key data points are:
* Physical media is cheap, either CDs, hard drive space, or flash memory.
* Customers have the right to duplicate music for their own personal use.
* Music inherently has value aside from the marketing attached to it.
That said, it seems reasonable to move towards a licensing model for music. Imagine if you bought a track, or an album (series of tracks), what you would be buying is a license to use these tracks. “Using” in this case is listening to them, no matter what the location of your playback device. Once you have a logon/logoff mechanism, and each customer has a purchase list on record, the next step is deciding how to broadcast the media. You should be able to log on to your own radio station in your car and listen to all the tracks you’ve bought. You should be able to record tracks you have a license for onto your portable device. You should be able to burn as many CDs as you want of the tracks you own. Lost your CD? You should be able to order a new one for postage only. The trick is to make the logon/logoff system ubiquitous, and integratable with a variety of systems from home stereos to computers. If you’re at a party with your friends, and the 6-CD changer has 3 of your CDs in it and 3 of your friend’s, then if both of you are logged on it will play back fine. Better yet, the playback should come broadcasted on demand based on this dual logon.
There are many technical gotchas for any system that will move the music industry to a license based model, but they are worth figuring out. Anything that benefits customers will be adopted, period. This should be the instrument of change, not RIAA mandates.
11:38:57 AM 
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