Music Piracy

Posted: May 13, 2012 in Commentary, Film, Music
Tags: , , ,

I recently attended Ted Cohen’s TAG Strategic conference at NARM.  There was the usual concern raised about music piracy.

In the UK, the BBC collects a license fee (£145.50 per year, per color TV set) to create programming that is free from commercial influence. This has worked well for many years.

ASCAP & BMI collect performance royalties in the US for the use of music and songs from radio and television and distribute the funds to writers and publishers based on how often the music is played.

Why can’t this model be used to collect fees from ISPs and then distribute the funds to the writers and publishers —  based on clicks or downloads? End of problem. No matter how many downloads, writers and publishers get paid for their work, insuring that they will produce more for their fans.

Let me know if you think this could be a solution.

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Comments
  1. g.e. stinson says:

    interesting idea. how would someone track the numerous pirate websites though? and how could someone find out who is responsible for them? i don’t even know if that’s possible. there is soundexchange.com, which is the group designated by congress to distribute royalties from digital sources but i don’t think they track pirate sites.

  2. What BMI does is track a sample of radio stations for airplay and then extrapolate the findings for the whole country. Maybe a sample would work in this case, but I think ISPs can track downloads fairly accurately.

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