I’m supposed to hate Rascal Flatts. I’m not exactly sure why. Are they too pretty? Do they not write their own material? Are they just not country enough?

Back when we lived in one homogenous society, it was important to be hip. When you knew every record on the hit parade, even if you didn’t like that genre of music, when you could see EVERY film released, before there were FIVE HUNDRED CABLE CHANNELS!

Oh is life confusing. It’s an overwhelming onslaught. Where do you spend your time? What club do you want to be a member of?

I know the hip music crowd. I used to be a member of it. We hated the Carpenters. But how could I explain that I lived to hear "Yesterday Once More" on the AM radio of my Chevy convertible? And twenty years after THAT the cognoscenti said the Carpenters were good AFTER ALL! HUH?

Rascal Flatts broke before I got the country memo. They were part of the Disney empire. I knew I was supposed to like something darker, more authentic. But when I heard their music on the radio, I didn’t want to turn it off. And then I got to the point where I looked forward to hearing the single from their new album, "Take Me There". I couldn’t find anything wrong with it, it made me FEEL GOOD!

So I’m sitting in the kitchen a couple of hours back, doing what I like most in life, eating Dannon coffee yogurt whilst reading the newspapers. And accompanying me, the special sauce, was XM’s Highway 16. And about twenty minutes in, when I’d fully escaped from my surroundings, was ensconced in the "Wall Street Journal"’s comparison of Facebook to GeoCities, these guys started TALKING on the radio.

Nobody talks on XM. Not much. It’s weird. Oftentimes you think you’re listening in a vacuum. In deep space. It’s just you and the MUSIC! But now these cats from Rascal Flatts were giving an explanation of their new music. And every reference sounded like rock to me, until they got to the Oak Ridge Boys. I don’t give a shit about the Oak Ridge Boys. So, I got back into the papers and then…THESE GUITARS START TO WAIL!

Where was it written that it had to be hard to listen to to be good? That you had to be an EDUCATED listener? That you just couldn’t go by your instincts, follow your DNA?

It’s a crazy fucked up world in which the most hated format is now the most similar to what I used to believe in. But that’s modern country. Oh, don’t tell me about the Nashville power brokers, the right wing radio. All I’ll say is they’re playing guitars, you can understand what they’re singing, and the music FEELS GOOD!

Kind of like "More Than A Feeling".

You remember when that hit the airwaves in the fall of ’76. More bad words were written about Boston than any other act of similar stature/record sales. Corporate rock. The beginning of the end. Then Brad Delp commits suicide and everybody comes out of the woodwork and says THEY LOVE BOSTON!

I love Boston. "Foreplay/Long Time" more than "More Than A Feeling". But really, "Hitch A Ride". I sing that to myself every day. It just feels right, it puts me in a mood.

So I went online and stole the Rascal Flatts album. And every track made sense. And I’m listening on my iPod as I’m lying on the floor doing my back exercises and "Still Feels Good" starts to play.

There’s the sweet harmonies the Eagles trademarked, that they punted on for an old J.D. Souther track that ain’t making much headway on country radio. And then someone less talented than Joe Walsh, but with just as much passion, is wringing a waterfall of sound out of his axe. It ain’t acoustic, it’s AMPLIFIED! And in the deep distance you can hear just the hint of a fiddle. And then it all breaks down…

That old t-shirt you wear to bed
Hangin’ off your shoulder by a thread
The one you ripped off me when we first met
Still feels good

That’s how you know you’ve got a relationship, when you’re wearing each other’s CLOTHES!

How long is your relationship with rock? Long enough to embrace the work of guys younger than you, playing in a genre you’ve sworn sucks?

That old familiar song blarin’ from my car
We know every note, every word by heart
Puts a smile on your face ’cause you know it’s ours
And it still feels good

This is us. We grew up addicted to the radio. We truly tasted freedom when we got behind the wheel and dialed in the stations our parents hated and BLASTED THEM! We love music. We don’t know where to turn. We’re afraid of looking uncool, but we still want that SOUND!

Oh, there’s a chorus. Even a banjo. But what makes me write this is the fucking WAILING GUITARS! I don’t know if Dann Huff, guitarist extraordinaire, the producer of this album, is playing, but whoever it is is a virtuoso. You know, a guy who never played football, was not president of his class, but stayed at home PRACTICING! Someone who never gave up, went to L.A. or Nashville to make it. And is HONORED to play on records!

You can choose to be out of the loop on this one. You can tell me it’s a hip-hop nation. I’ll just point to Nickelback. No matter WHAT you think of the band’s music its sales prove we live in a ROCK AND ROLL NATION! The mainstream press didn’t get the memo, but those in Nashville did. They’ve recast their music for the demo, they’ve entered an abandoned sphere, inhabited by baby boomers in the seventies.

I’m not a betting man. But I surmise that Rascal Flatts will blow Kanye away. Oh, you won’t see them on the train-wreck VMAs. There won’t be a battle with Kenny Chesney in the press (actually, they’re friends!) But when the SoundScan totals are released next week expect them to have sold in excess of a million copies of their new album.

Oh, does this mean the business is saved?

Anything BUT!

This just proves that there’s a demand for good music. Stuff that’s easy to listen to, that makes you feel good.

Start with these criteria. Rather than trying to impress your buddies in the business.

Note: There are two versions of "Still Feels Good" out there. Pass on the 2:39 one, download the 3:56 album version with the extended guitar coda.

I was pleased to see that my note provoked so much interest, as well _as some well thought-out counter arguments. Taking a few of these comments, I have the following words in response:

First, however, I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing. A subscription service works as follows: a user signs on for a period of time, like a cellular contract. The monthly fee is $5 to $10. You then have the right to download a limitless number of songs, which you can sort into playlists, etc. At this point, the service is just like iTunes.

Each month, you connect back up to the server, which automatically tracks/notes what songs each user listened to that prior month. The revenue from that user is then distributed to the owners of the recordings based on the number of times each song was listened to. Every month, the money from each user is divided up amongst the owners of each recording, to be shared with the artists and publishers.

If you end your subscription, the songs you downloaded to your hard drive disappear, after a notice and warning period. These downloads are called "tethered" because the owner can yank them back if the condition of payment isn’t being met. The desire to continue to use the service becomes increasingly sticky as the database of the user’s songs increases over time. No one wants to lose their collection.

The essence of the subscription model is a radically reduced price to the consumer, tied to a premise that so long as you pay the modest monthly sum you can enjoy all the benefits of ownership.

Of course, for an incremental fee, you can permanently own any songs you wish, and the tether will be removed.
_
To Jim Griffin:

I am not sure what program you are promoting. It seems you like the idea of an involuntary fee at the ISP level. While this is a lovely notion, it is unfortunately not going to happen. It’s tantamount to having the government impose a new "music" tax.

This involuntary system isn’t what Bob was promoting in his email. He likes the idea of a nominal, flat monthly, voluntary fee to allow limitless, permanent downloads via the P2P services. To quote Bob’s Blog on this subject:

"This system (to charge lots of people for the right to secure ownership) already exists. All that lacks is the monetization. This is the P2P world. Instead of suing customers, the RIAA should be licensing them. An insurance policy AGAINST being sued. Sure, not everybody would pay, but many would. Revenue would be coming in instead of going out. It wouldn’t be much per customer, but it would be a lot in the AGGREGATE! There’s your album model… Instead of getting one person to buy many albums at ten bucks a throw, get the people who AREN’T buying music to pay ten bucks a month. And add it all up at the end of the day and you’ve got a huge pile."

Responding to Bob’s proposal, unfortunately, if the downloads are permanent, there is no way to avoid the inequity of unconditional ownership being granted for fractional pennies. All Big Champagne can do is tell us what songs are being downloaded. Merely tracking the songs that are downloaded doesn’t address the money issue for the labels, artists and publishers.

_Jim addresses this inequity by stating that payment is involuntary. While I would love this to be imposed, it will never happen in the practical world.
_
By the way, Jim, your ASCAP analogy is false because with ASCAP there is no PURCHASE, merely the rental for a term of contract of the right to perform the music in the venue, which is a transient usage. The analogy would apply if someone could join ASCAP for a month and then quit, with ongoing _rights to play every song forever with no more fees.

_The challenge between Bob’s desire to make music, essentially, free, and Jim’s desire to make payment mandatory, is a voluntary subscription model that is so attractive that it transforms how people consume music.

_Finally, my objection to licensing p2p is not based on a belief that i t_somehow keeps the illegal exchange of music under control. Illegal _music will always be a problem. When I first installed cable, the installer offered to give me free movies if I tipped him $50. Everyone had the same experience. But this is no longer the case. A combination of a better pricing model AND a better technological approach transformed the cable marketplace. I believe the same can work with music.

To Dave Lang:

Simple economics show that the incremental value to the user of a few new songs is insufficient to prevent wholesale drop-outs when the nominal cost per song become undesirable. The user will terminate the subscription and steal or borrow those additional songs.

To John Brodey:

I wish the sole problem was the quality of today’s music and that people would pay if the music were superior. That is disproven by the number of Beatles songs that have been illegally downloaded. We need to change people’s thinking about music, and a huge part of that is recognizing that to the modern consumer, music has become a commodity. It must be sold accordingly.

To David Reilly:

You are arguing that the model will never change. I disagree. Moreover, the current model is failing both the labels and the artists. No one who knows me can doubt that I am a fierce artist’s advocate, but the last thing I want to see is the labels go down in flames because the labels are still the only companies willing to spend money so that you can discover new artists and music.

To Charles Crossley, Jr.:

"Giving the consumers what they want" isn’t the issue. What they want is free, unlimited music. I’d love someone to give me a free phone and car, but eventually there won’t be any car or phone companies. The cost of making albums and promoting artists isn’t going to disappear. The dream of the internet as the perfect tool to connect artists with their fans was disproved when not a single MP3.com artist became a star.

What is needed is a radical new way of thinking about how music can be sold and consumed. Subscriptions may not be perfect, and it may take a generation to change how we think about consuming music, but the other models all fail because they do not generate enough long term revenue to support the system.

To Dwayne Keir:

It is unrealistic to assume that without an organized industry, significant numbers of new music artists will be able to earn a living. No one pays enough money to see an unknown band for the band to survive. That’s why record labels are often required to subsidize tours of their new acts. The "connection" comes from repeated, costly exposure, that someone has to pay to create and nurture.

To Bob Klanac:

As I have said, the subscription model will require radical consumer rethinking before it is fully embraced. Indeed, the technology that will allow full portability, including all the unfettered benefits of ownership, hasn’t been perfected yet.

Once the benefits of enjoying a subscription are equal to the benefits of unlimited ownership, the conversion can commence – but I suspect that Bob Klanac wont be an early adopter.

To Sean Burak:

Your approach is intriguing but it seems like a tortured way to avoid a very simple subscription model. Like Jim Griffin’s approach, it requires a mandatory payment model, that is as off-putting to the consumer as the rental model inherent in a subscription. More critically, it still fails to accord enough money to the owners, artists and publishers to support an ongoing industry. The issue isn’t tracking so the money can be divvyed up, it’s the actual dollars it can generate for the access it allows.

If a user downloads even 1,000 songs in a month, even at your high of $50 per month, the incremental payment for unconditional ownership drops to FIVE CENT per song. At such a rate, the financial model completely collapses. A million selling album would generate a total gross of $600,000, barely enough to pay the costs of recording, little yet any promotional or marketing costs.

In summary, while the arguments are well-meaning, I am dissuaded that there is any inherent flaw in the subscription model other than the difficulty of adoption, which I have already noted.

I am not suggesting the the subscription model is the ONLY solution, but in my thinking, supported by almost 30 years of experience int his business, it is a model that requires serious exploration and dialog because what we have today clearly isnt working.

Note from Bob: I was advocating LICENSING! Whether it be voluntary OR at the ISP level. Better to accumulate SOME revenue rather than none!

Jim Griffin:

I was shocked to read Gary Stiffelman’s comments because a professional like Gary should know better than to sling the falsehoods he so casually tossed in his comments. Let’s clear up these mistakes lest they spread:

1. No one proposes network licensing without sampling the network to help split the money proportionally. It’s relatively easy, and companies like Big Champagne have been doing it accurately for years.

2. If Gary’s indicting collective licensing without census data, then ASCAP/BMI/SESAC/SoundExchange (or their counterparts worldwide) can’t license hotel lobbies, restaurants, pubs, webcasters (there are many webcasters, even big ones, who don’t report). etc. — there are European countries that license music in taxicabs without sampling. Is he arguing this money should be turned away until such time as we get perfect data? That until we can effectively monitor everything we license we shouldn’t take their money? Absurd.

3. The voluntary subscriptions he touts are like so many other voluntary endeavors — they are like a tip jar, and their results speak for themselves. Even their employees acknowledge they will work better as involuntary, actuarial network fees. Rhapsody and Napster combined don’t come close to the delta of loss experienced from networks.

4. Gary thinks music’s failure to license somehow reduces the losses from these networks, and that’s ridiculous. The amount of downloading, trading and otherwise transferring music on-line and off-line will continue regardless of licensing, but licensing can monetize the anarchy of networks without controlling them. I repeat: Our failure to license does not reduce the use of networks to trade music, it only reduces the amount of money we receive for what happens anyway.

5. The red-herring — people will download everything and then quit — isn’t possible with involuntary network fees. What’s your suggestion, Gary? That a fee on a university network that collectively can gross billions worldwide will somehow lead students to go to school to download music and then they will quit school, having gorged themselves on music? That people will quit their ISP once they’ve acquired all the music they want? Never mind your implication that new music isn’t worth the fee, these are the sorts of crazy, now disproven arguments once made against putting movies on HBO or making video cassette recorders (or insert the name of most any new technology here, especially MP3 players) legal (people will record all the shows and music and never watch or listen again!). The sports business got it right after a brief period of legislating against broadcasting games: They did what you, Bob, now in effect advise record companies to do: They got baseball, basketball and football on the basic tier of every cable network, thus gleaning a fee for that which they otherwise feared, and they’ve never looked back. I could go on but will not. Gary’s comments are proof that some will cling to the old vine regardless of the facts and they seemingly choose not to learn from history.

_____________________________________________

Dave Lang

"Imagine if your idea were accepted: A consumer pays ten bucks for a free month of p2p and downloads 10,000 albums. Then he stops paying, keeps his 10,000 albums of music, and laughs as the labels all go out of business." – Gary Stiffelman

I guess Gary thinks that nobody will want to buy any new music? We’re only interested in catalog? Highlights mainstream thinking about the business these days.

Dave Lang

_____________________________________________

John Brodey:

As per Stiffelman’s comments; his problem with Apple seems more about the fact that their monopolistic position is a byproduct of regularly introducing innovative and exciting products. People love them. You don’t think MS would be a tyrant if they had that kind of brand loyalty and product line? Subscription is a concept. Of course it doesn’t work if you let everyone join for a month and then dump you after they’ve had their fill. Obviously, Verizon wouldn’t be discounting phones if you could then buy the phone and dump them a month later. You can’t get in on an IPO and then sell the stock 24 hours later after a big opening day. No, it’s about how you turn the concept into a practicable reality. Nobody can tell me it can’t be done. Guess what, people started paying for tv and water because the free versions sucked. Doesn’t work for music today, why would people rent what they don’t feel committed enough to buy? You better give them a good reason. Does that mean they won’t pay at all? No, just give them a way to do the right thing. Music isn’t water, it’s not a product and anyone who thinks otherwise is probably disproportionately concerned with the survival of the big labels. The consumer is far more receptive to doing right by the very artists the label’s are hiding behind.

_____________________________________________

Bob, please oh please keep me anonymous:

Dude, technology is a moving target. Get with the program. Ya just can’t fight/end it. These lawsuits are going nowhere. I’m still downloading my ass off. Last I heard, Con Ed, NYSEG and all the other utilities were never selling a lifestyle. Nice try with your analogy… from an otherwise good lawyer. Just looking out for his clients I guess. Get with the program. Do your homework Gary… you’re credibilty is questionable. You’re a lawyer for fuck’s sake!!! And no one ever wants to be in PG&E’s fan club.

_____________________________________________

David Reilly

Bob,

Re: stiffleman, Who the fuck has time to download 10,000 albums in a month??? Or ever for that matter.

He is wrong. I refuse to pay for cable/satellite tv. I buy the occasional bottle of water for convenience when I’m out.

I will not rent music nor the right to play it. It is not like renting
movies, and I buy a lot of the classic movies anyway.

It is not irrelevant – to own or rent – if you know the difference.

Then again, ashes to ashes, you could say no-one owns anything, but I think that’s a different line of thought.

I am fine with apple’s model. It works great and NOBODY else could figure it out, so they deserve to have it all. One song – one dollar, what’s the problem?

Still leaves my question: how do the artists get paid in this P2P world?

Glad I’ve still got a US bank account to shop itunes at the abovementioned rate.

David Reilly

_____________________________________________

Charles Crossley, Jr.

Gary Stiffelman says:

"Its time to begin supporting the only model that can possibly replace the income that the labels and artists need in order to survive the current crisis. Do your homework. Understand better how the subscription model can work, then open your mind to a practical future."

My reply:

Music subscriptions aren’t wheels. They aren’t electricity. They aren’t flying machines. They aren’t bottled water vs. smelly bad-tasting tap water. They aren’t satellite television vs. cable television vs. network television. Music subscriptions aren’t any of that, because a music subscription isn’t what we want. Since we don’t want it, that model is going to fail.

See, everything in that list, except for cable and satellite television, we own once we’ve bought it. That goes even for electricity, which we can store in a battery if we want. Even with pay television, we can videotape the program or save the program on our TiVo and pretty much do whatever we want with it.

Music subscriptions don’t allow any of that. So, how are they the same? We don’t own the music with a music subscription like we do with these other things. So, since we don’t own it, it’s not what we want.

What’s more, you’ve failed to address the main issue. You’re competing against free. Illegal, yes, but still free.

Lefsetz’s model addresses the main issue, and gives the consumers what they want at a reasonable price.

What’s more, Lefsetz’s model of paying a monthly fee for P2P isn’t even the Apple model. It’s a model legalizing what the customer wants. To be able to get any track they want for a minimal price and own it. I don’t know why you think Lefsetz’s model is the same as supporting iTunes. Yes, he loves Apple. He also supports other things.

If "someday" is ever going to arrive, then, yes, by all means let’s begin now. Let’s dump the "gouge the fan" mentality and find a way to provide the fan with what they want at a reasonable price.

I’ve read that software developed as a result of the original Napster for monitoring music files now exists. I recall Lefsetz was the one who alerted us to this. Check it out over here: www.noankmedia.com/. If that’s true, the labels have the means to monitor usage. There will be bugs, there will be modifications, no new computer technology is ever perfect the first time it’s rolled out. But it’s there. So it can be done.

So when are we going to change?

Charles Crossley, Jr.
A fan of rock and roll

_____________________________________________

Please post anon if you do this.

Gary Stiffelman:

"Changing how people consume anything is difficult, but, for heaven’s sake, we BUY water now. Someone like you probably wrote that we’d never live with that model either, yet it has succeeded gloriously."

Riiight! That’s a really great example to drag out..NOT! It has succeded gloriously as a MARKETING CAMPAIGN, not in terms of sustainable, ethical product development. www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html .

In fact as a case study it supports all the arguments in favour of a corrupt dying record industry ruled by fat greedy wankers with size 100+ egos!

More proof? www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/pablo_calculate.php

As Douglas Adams said, we need to ship these people off into a starship and fire it into the sun…regime change is needed.

_____________________________________________

Dwayne Keir:

"Imagine if your idea were accepted: A consumer pays ten bucks for a free month of p2p and downloads 10,000 albums. Then he stops paying, keeps his 10,000 albums of music, and laughs as the labels all go out of business."

What difference does it make when you have all of the music ever recorded in the palm of your hand.

www.macnn.com/articles/06/11/28/google.vp.on.ipod.video/

Music isn’t a product… its a connection, why on earth would you ever go and see a band live. You have them in the palm of your hand… Hell you even have their live album to boot.

The connection is what is being sold. That connection is most vivid and tactile when it is formed organically, formed naturally. It can come in the form of hearing a certain band or music at a certain time in a certain place. Hmmm…what do T.V. shows and movies do? Oh yeah… that’s right…they evoke something at a certain time in a certain place.

It is about being enlightened about paths to travel down and experiencing the experience they entail. That is what you make money off of. Show people more connections and you make more money, but let them decide what connections they want to make. It is as simple as that.

Some people eat to live, others live to eat, but we all eat. For some people music is background noise to interrupt the monotony of a day, for others it is their life. But we all listen.

And we all know what we like, and what we don’t like, be it food or music.

"People can listen to music on the radio for free, they come to see you for a connection" – Livingston Taylor

_____________________________________________

Bob Klanac

Bob

Tell Gary Stiffelman that subscription will never work for one simple reason. Long-time music consumers such as myself will never buy into it. Period.

Whether it’s ones-and-zeros or grooves in a piece of vinyl, music fans will want to own it.

If he needs a business plan to figure out what a consumer thinks, then he may as well buy the farm now.

Bob Klanac

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Mario

Gary Stiffelman is right. You can con people into paying for anything: TV, water, music subscriptions. But "can" doesn’t mean "should."

Your model could work like this: $x for xGB/month. That’d keep people coming back.

-Mario

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Sean Burak

I think Gary is missing the point. The concerns he raises are valid (although for such a long rant he only really raised two):

1. There needs to be accounting for which tracks get downloaded

2. There will be people who pay the monthly fee for one month and download all the music they can find.

With some creativity, though, both of these can be easily remedied.

First of all, regarding fair allotment of funds, even if the model is "one price for unlimited downloads", this doesn’t prevent the system from tracking the downloads. Each user has to log in, presumably, before they access the music. Then you track each click and each download (just as with ads). If a user downloads a song more than once, it only counts as one download. Then all of the funds collected (After the labels take their necessary 99% of the money) gets spread to all of the artists based on number of unique-user-downloads (UUD – a new industry ranking term?). In fact, it is a great idea that no matter what model is chosen, each click should be monitored so that the LP2P (legal p2p) system can suggest new tracks, new artists and even advertise other things to the music buying customer (download a diddy track, see an ad for his clothing line etc) – yet another revenue stream for the labels (and, to their joy, one that doesn’t ever need to be shared with artists!)

As for the second issue, there are a few creative ways it can be counteracted. The first is to do what the cellphone companies do — set people up on long term contracts. So you can pay $50/month for a month-to-month plan, $20/month for a 12 month plan and $10/month if you sign up on a 3 year contract. Another way is to offer several versions of each song and limit the download speed. So there would be a 64k mp3 of each song as a "sample", which downloads fast enough that you can essentially stream it for immediate trial purposes. This satisfies the requirement for immediate gratification. Then for the REAL download, it’s 256k and takes longer to get — so that it is physically impossible to download the entire catalogue in just a month. Another way is to disallow concurrent downloads — you can download only one track or one album at a time, and you can download as many as you like but they download in a sequential manner. Yet another way — and this is the best way — is to make sure that there is a constant stream of NEW AND INTERESTING MUSIC. If you only sign up for one month, you can only get the music that’s already been released. But under this new model, bands will have an incentive to release tracks as soon as they are completed — releasing full albums won’t make as much sense. So, yeah, you can pay once but you’ll be behind the times within a couple of months. This fear is based on the assumption that people only care about the legacy tracks. There is a truth to this, but hopefully in the end, the new model results in more and better new music!

And my final note is regarding the fear of these pay-once-download-all type of users. These people are going to hoard and download from somewhere. If you don’t give them an opportunity to "pay for one month", they are going to find a way to get their legacy tracks by paying nothing. The people who are going to treat a pay-for-play system this way are the people ALREADY getting everything for free. You might as well get ten or twenty bucks out of them. Meanwhile, under the current system, my mom, my dad, my sisters — the regular people who aren’t nerds — are not buying anything at all. THESE are the people that need to be targeted by a monthly p2p service that is easy to use and offers no frustrating restrictions, either on megabytes, number of tracks, where they can be played etc. — and these people are not going to try to download the entire catalogue in one month. There is no point in stressing out over the hardcore downloaders because they will always find a way around the system. Every day that goes by without an easy p2p system for the masses (while the industry waits for a magic solution to the problem of the bulk-downloading-nerds) represents potential dollars that are being lost by everyone in the industry.

Sean Burak
www.hcal.ca/

Gary Stiffelman:

Sometimes it seems like you are on Apple’s payroll. Every idea other than iPod is regularly condemned by you, whether its a company deciding to reject Apple’s monopolistic pricing and rigid distribution model, or efforts to explore new models that in any way differ from the iTunes model. I love how you propounded the Razor blade model, yet you fail to see how Apple turned it on its ear, making money from selling razors while barely breaking even selling the blades. Since only the revenue from the blades is shared with the labels and artists, it is critical that the model be fixed.

Your feigned support for subsidized P2P is ludicrious because you know that the labels will never sanction a model that allows people to download whatever they want for a fixed price, yet fails to monoitor usage and pay the owners ratably. Such a system rips off the artists worse that any label has ever ever tried. If you don’t somehow allocate the income proportionately to the use, and the use isn’t randomized like radio, then the artists are being screwed. Subscriptions are fair because the same process that ensures that a user’s subscription is up to date also reports on usage so that the revenue equitably can be shared.

Imagine if your idea were accepted: A consumer pays ten bucks for a free month of p2p and downloads 10,000 albums. Then he stops paying, keeps his 10,000 albums of music, and laughs as the labels all go out of business.

Your condemnation of subscriptions is also premised on a belief that people want permanent physical possession of their music. You then inexplicably argue in favor of sanctioned p2p to achieve this goal, yet a digital file is a digital file…ones and zeros. Whether you buy it or rent is is irrelevant to the distinction. We rent our cable TV service, we rent our electricity and phone service, we rent our apartments and we lease our cars. Indeed anything we borrow to own is, essentially, ours only so long as we make the payments.

You argue that people won’t pay to rent their music today…"maybe someday" you concede. Twenty or thirty years ago no one thought we would be paying for TV, but more people probably pay for TV access than ever watched for free. And it didnt take very long to change.

If "someday" is ever going to arrive, then we must begin now. Changing how people consume anything is difficult, but, for heaven’s sake, we BUY water now. Someone like you probably wrote that we’d never live with that model either, yet it has succeeded gloriously. Indeed, there was probably an Lefsetz back in the age of the Wright Brothers arguing that if man were meant to fly, he would have wings, and arguing that electricity will never replace gas lighting. Perhaps an ancestor of yours was arguing against the wheel…I can imaging the blog: "feet good, wheel bad".

Its time to begin supporting the only model that can possibly replace the income that the labels and artists need in order to survive the current crisis. Do your homework. Understand better how the subscription model can work, then open your mind to a practical future.