Warner Music Group hires Jim Griffin (via Portfolio.com) *** Music Like Water is getting real

Read this and smile: Warner's New Web Guru, via Portfolio.com.

'"WMG has tapped industry veteran Jim Griffin to spearhead a controversial plan to bundle a monthly fee into consumers' internet-service bills for unlimited access to music. The plan—the boldest move yet to keep the wounded entertainment industry giants afloat—is simple: Consumers will pay a monthly fee, bundled into an internet-service bill in exchange for unfettered access to a database of all known music..."

Comment: the plan is not so about keeping wounded giants afloat - it's to build a new garden for them and for everyone else to play in - if they can play without owning the house.

Jim Griffin says: "But we're swinging toward the vine of music as a service. We need to get ready to let go and grab the next vine, which is a pool of money and a fair way to split it up, rather than controlling the quantity and destiny of sound recordings."....Griffin says those fees could create a pool as large as $20 billion annually to pay artists and copyright holders. Eventually, advertising could subsidize the entire system, so that users who don't want to receive ads could pay the fee, and those who don't mind advertising wouldn't pay a dime..."

Here we go with Music Like Water!  A pool of money and a fair way to split it up.

"Jim will vehemently deny the 'tax' label," says Akamai's Barrett. "But it's a tax nonetheless. It'll be a government-approved cartel that collects money from virtually everyone—often without their knowledge—and failure to pay their tax will ultimately result in people with guns coming to your door.."

My comment: What  is the argument here? Are ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and the other PROs / MROs also just cartels that extort money for something you don't want? Or are they important (if sometimes clumsy) instruments of a voluntary blanket license that enable the 'fair use of music with fair remuneration'?  If you call this a tax then I don't know what would not be a tax.

My quote (as printed in this feature):

"Gerd Leonhard, a respected music-industry consultant who has advised Sony/BMG, which recently announced plans for a flat-rate-subscription model for digital music, rejects Barrett's argument that the monthly fee amounts to a tax. "This is not a tax," says Leonhard. "It's bundled into another charge."
"People should not be too harsh on Jim for trying to get the ball rolling," says Leonhard. "At this point, 96 percent of the population is guilty of some sort of infringement, whether they're streaming or downloading or sharing. "What we have here is the widespread use of technology that declares all of the population to be illegal."

Clarification on my part: I consulted Ged Doherty at SonyBMG UK (i.e. not the US company).

My final comment... below. The Music is in the Network and the MONEY IS IN THE NETWORK.

Update:

Slashdot comments

Techcrunch comments (Michael Arrington applies his usual shutgun approach to the issue - I think he's severely challenged with issues that take longer than making a frappucino at Starbucks)

Update #2

Ars Technica says:  "Griffin's musings may not amount to much of anything, but the fact that Warner and Griffin are floating trial balloons is another indication that the record industry has begun thinking outside the small box it has inhabited for so long...."

Techdirt responds with the quite unoriginal and in-informed 'this is a tax'  rant.

Check out my new book, Music2.0. Get a printed copy or download the pay-what-you-want pdf here

Comments

[Jon Smirl]

This tax has a tremendous side effect of allowing sites like MySpace/Bebo/etc to use the entire catalog of music without paying a dime since the consumer has already been billed by the ISP. The value generated from the music mainly accrues to MySpace/Bebo/etc and only marginally to the ISP.

Get the RIAA out of retail and taxation. License MySpace/Bebo/etc. They have the money and can pay. Allow the consumers to trade freely and freely consume from licensed sites. Aggressively prosecute websites that don't license. Let MySpace/Bebo deal with retail and figure out how to make enough money to pay off the RIAA.

Note to RIAA - file sharing will disappear if you license commercial sites for unrestricted downloading.

[Gerd Leonhard]

Jon, 2 things here: 1) the flat rate, imho, should be available to anyone that wants to use music, INCLUDING bebo facebook last.fm and all of the estimated 1500 social networks around the world; i.e. the flat rate must be a DEFAULT LICENSE that can allow anyone to build their business on-top of (yes.. like radio). Remember that the networks don't currently have any good interfaces for finding and selecting music - the social nets do. I can envision that some telcos may then end up buying some of the social nets -- once the license is there. b) It's NOT ENOUGH to license only the companies that have got deep pockets because they were acquired by even deeper pockets. That just creates more startups that can never get a license. We need a LICENSING STANDARD not licensing exceptions.