universal music tax - the lowdown on downloads
You’d be hard-pressed to find an industry that has had a worse decade than the music business. Following seven consecutive year-on-year declines between 2000 and 2006, music unit sales have fallen nearly 50 per cent from $36.9 billion to $19.6 billion. In 2000, music unit sales referred to the sale of compact discs, cassettes and vinyl. These days, you can add ring tones and downloads to that figure, but the total is still only going in one direction: down. If the music labels don’t turn things around this year it may be too late to save the industry. Perhaps, it’s already too late.
Because we are all music fans, we all have an opinion on what’s wrong with the industry. The music labels blame internet piracy. Music fans blame the declining quality of pop music, an argument as old as Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel. Technology advocates blame the business model: selling a plastic disc for £12.99 has gone the way of the eight-track tape. We’re all right. But there is only one opinion that matters at the moment: that of the music labels. As the industry’s lobbying group, the IFPI, said earlier this year, 2008 is the year it goes after the internet service providers. Suing individual file-sharers was always a doomed tactic; choking off the exchange at its source would yield a far greater result.
Pressuring lawmakers, as the industry has done with increasing success in Britain and France, to force the ISPs to police its networks is step one. Now, we are seeing step two: a radical tax charged to broadband customers allowing them to download all the music they want in exchange for a monthly fee. This is the proposal of Warner Music. Warner is mulling doing away with the per-track fee in exchange for a nominal rental fee – what some are saying would be as little as a fiver every month. Similar measures by Sony BMG, Warner and EMI in Denmark are a bit further along, as is Universal Music’s landmark deal with Nokia on a new handset, sold at a premium, that will have access to the major’s catalogue for an extra fee. [source: times on-line] technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3669869.ece
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Charles Dunstone, the chief executive of Carphone Warehouse has said that he would refuse to disconnect internet users caught illegally downloading copyright music and other items. This why the labels want control over platforms like myspace and last.fm so that they can monitor everyone with their cookies and squids.