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relevant to what my post is about, but I appreciate your enthusiasm --
and I'm sure Trent does too.
The EFF has advocated this for some time: http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-volunt...
And I'm not sure the radio licensing system is such a great model, regardless of how much it helped the industry early on in its evolution. Do we really want to base a new-media strategy on something created half a century ago for what is now a dying medium?
I don't know about you, but I would gladly pay a 5$ tax to get original cds, instead of just the digital versions.
I agree though, that not everyone should pay this fee - online people who download.
In such a napster, count me in!
similar kind of tax, applied to a large group when only a small
portion of that group engages in the behaviour that is supposedly
being taxed.
Original cds are for me irreplaceable: the procedure of listening to the cd, while having the box in your hand, reading the leaflet, looking at the artwork. I like that...
newspapers -- and eight-track tapes :-)
Maybe next time he'll consider a lower quality version, free to download; a high-quality and/or lossless version for $5 and a special cd (or even better, vinyl) release, signed in the artist's blood for $15?
And then treat it like a software release and bribe loads of bloggers to write about it.
These are early days for this new method of delivering paid-for music -- Reznor and other musicians need to recognise that we're all on a learning curve.
any comments on that model?
Fisher himself admits in his book, what he proposes would create a
giant bureaucracy as large or larger than the U.S. Patent Office
(which is understaffed, underfunded and riddled with errors) which
would determine what artists received and who was paid what based on
some kind of ridiculously complicated Nielsen-style measurement
formula.
And all of it would be funded by a new tax on Internet access -- which
would have to keep increasing in order to replace the revenue that
artists and rights holders would supposedly be "losing" as more and
more people downloaded their music. It's almost ridiculously complex,
a kind of legal Rube Goldberg device designed to improve the lives of
artists at the expense of everyone else. If I didn't know better, I
would think it was a long, elaborate satire, like Swift's A Modest
Proposal.
Seriously, though. This is my experience with the Radiohead and Trent Reznor album downloads: I am a fan of both, and paid for each album -- $5 for the Trent Reznor/Saul Williams set, and over $9 for Radiohead's In Rainbows. Both sucked. And that may partially explain why Trent is feeling frustrated now. Maybe if this was the best thing since Downward Spiral, word of mouth would have made more people willing to shell out cash for the download. But there wasn't much of a buzz, and that's why not as many fans downloaded or paid for it, IMHO.
It's an album by an unknown artist. Really, who is Saul Williams? I've never heard of him before this story hit the news. So how many of those downloads were people grabbing the album to try it out, then coming back later and paying for it?
Also, the album hasn't been getting very good reviews, which likely only exacerbates the lack of paying customers. Given the chance, I'd download the album for free, then either pay something if I liked it or delete the files if I didn't like it.
over copyright infringement.
With all of that said. I think its still a dumb idea. Its just not that simple. If it was then ISP's would already be blocking all of the illegal downloads in the first place.