Could $5 a month save the music industry?

http://www.thestar.com/article/305082

The Songwriters Association of Canada proposes a $5 monthly fee on subscribers’ Internet bills that would make it legal to download music and hopefully save the failing music industry.

I find myself disagreeing most strongly with this idea.

This proposal seems to basically make the assumption that everyone on the Internet is downloading pirated music. Nothing could be further from the truth and making all of us pay this arbitrary amount is unfair. Some of us do pay for our music (I do when the option is available) and some don't download music at all. Add to this that the money is only proposed to go to Canadian artists. How many of us download $5 worth of Canadian content a month - that's sixty Canadian songs a year at the 99 cent iTunes price? Yeah, I thought so.

Second, the system for downloading music sucks, period. Peer-to-peer (P2P) sources like the most popular Limewire, are riddle with malicious software -
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/58511.html.
A study conducted in 2006
(http://www.imconf.net/imc-2006/papers/p33-kalafut.pdf)
found that 68% of executables, archive and MSOffice files downloaded from Limewire contained malware (viruses and adware) mostly in the form of exe and zip files. Since then it has only gotten worse. This isn't really Limewire's fault. They've just spilled over into popular culture (especially with young people) to the point where everyone under the age of 20 is going there. I know there are people that feel that anyone dumb enough to download an exe or zip from an unknown source deserves what they get, but the truth is, when the population downloading is as large as it is, a significant number will not be knowledgeable enough to know the risks that they're taking. I teach computer science to grade tens. Almost all of them download from Limewire and most (at the beginning of my course at least) do not know what P2P or file extensions even mean. They also don't read Windows alerts, so when they get a pop-up telling them this is risky behavior, they click okay without even registering that Windows was warning them to stop.

In my opinion, this is not the fault of those that provide P2P services. iTunes has shown that people are more then willing to fork over some dough for their songs, yet the music industry has yet to capitalize on it. Instead they whine and complain about how no one is buying CDs anymore because of music downloads, and governments should do something. Know what? This isn't the governments' problem, it's the music industry's. Markets shift. Deal with it, and learn to make some money off it.

Here's an idea. In Ontario we have something called the Brewer's Retail which sells all the beer in this province. They are completely run by a consortium of brewers. Their stores are clean, convenient, and EVERYWHERE. Customers are happy and well served so whenever there is a call that the monopoly given to the Brewer's Retail should be broken, it never gathers any steam. Quite frankly, most people are pretty happy with how things are.

Alright music industry. If megacorp brewers can do it, so can you. Become the Brewer's retail of music. Create one place where we can go to buy music. Make it clean, convenient and cheap and we will come. iTunes sells for a dollar a song, well sell for 50 cents. A new album comes out, here are two songs you can download for free, the rest will cost. No one can convince my this wouldn't be a license to make money.

Also, you folks are sitting on vast libraries of material - sell it! I want to rebuild my vinyl collection digitally, but it's not available on iTunes. There is no reason that in this age I shouldn't expect that to be available, legally, on-line. If I want the entire collection of The Nice for my mp3 player, you should make it available. Hell, the overhead is virtually zero and right now you are making nothing on the material anyway.

So, here is the biggest reason I am against this proposal - it takes the responsibility of the current situation away from where it belongs, with the music industry itself. Common guys, get the collective pickle out of your ass and make some money out of this.

Mike