5 cent downloadable songs solution?

Producer-manager and now academic Sandy Pearlman has an outrageous idea for saving the recording indudstry by making millions from untapped resources.

Pearlman was apparently the first person to use the term "heavy metal" in print, during his days as a journalist with Crawdaddy magazine. Long associated as a producer with Blue Oyster Cult and their hits "Don't Fear The Reaper" and "Godzilla", Pearlman also recorded the second album by The Clash and once managed Black Sabbath. His music industry credentials are extremely credible.

But at the same time, it signals a colossal change in the nature of the industry with too many unpredictable outcomes. I do agree with the principle of selling more music to more people at lower prices that the common 99 cents per track we see how from iTunes, etc.

Here's an interesting idea from yesterday's Globe & Mail. There are pros to it. People utilize computers and the Internet to acquire music, so why not tax them? The cons are obvious, though. Not everyone uses the Internet to download MP3s. Artists will not likely agree to sellings songs for 5 cents each! Even if this system was in place, people would still download music totally for free through existing means.

What would 5 cent downloadable songs do to the bricks and mortar aspect of the music industry? Would sales of CDs plummet so much that the format will go the way of the cassette? Will they stay in existance but sell for one to two dollars?

This revolutionary idea is too drastic with too many unknown outcomes in order for it to be taken seriously. The music industry will never adopt it. They might, however, try to implement an Internet tax based on the type of data consumers download. But that, too, is an old idea that didn't amount to anything, maybe based on privacy considerations. Big brother can't watch everything you download.

Would you pay 5 cents for a song?
McGill academic has a plan to end file swapping and save the music industry
By GUY DIXON

Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Updated at 6:30 AM EST

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

An academic at McGill University has a simple plan to stop the plague of unauthorized music downloads on the Internet. But it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it, and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening.

Peering out from under his de rigueur cap, music-industry veteran Sandy Pearlman, a former producer of the Clash and now a visiting scholar at McGill, spoke with a kind of nervous glee while describing his idea at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto last week.

Pearlman proposes putting all recorded music on a robust search engine -- Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work -- and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song. In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.

The assumption is that if songs cost only 5 cents, people would download exponentially more music. Daniel Levitin, a McGill professor also associated with the project, said that a simple computer program, such as those already in use on Internet retail sites, could track people's purchases and help them to dig through what would become a massive repository of music on the Web.

The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, Pearlman said his study predicts.

It may all sound like a pie-in-the-sky idea, academically elegant but impractical. Or is it?

The head of the British recording industry, who also spoke at the conference, made much the same point: music companies need to get used to the idea of selling more music to more people more often, but for less money. It was a notion repeated often during the conference.

Users of file-sharing services made roughly 25 billion unauthorized downloads last year, dwarfing the legitimate music industry, and it's only getting worse. Some upstart technology companies are trying to figure out ways to profit from file-sharing, but the potential market is limited.

Pearlman added that nothing concrete is in the works with Apple beyond talks, and he has not yet spoken with Google. Still, Apple is listening, and this is the company that has already changed the industry by creating, many believe, the best working model for on-line downloading services.

Pearlman argued that his plan isn't a revolt against the industry. It's merely a pricing decision. Apple should simply be charging 5 cents instead of 99 cents a song, he said. This would bring in millions upon millions of more customers. And he believes that the best place to test this would be in Canada, which has laws he regards as being more supportive of artists and accommodating to an initiative such as this.

Yet, Pearlman went further. He said that since this plan puts the onus on a massive Internet presence to distribute all the music in the world, why not have such computer companies as Apple and such major Internet companies as Yahoo simply buy up the world's four major record labels? Pearlman was careful to add, though, that he doesn't see his plan killing off demand for CDs.

The recording industry is against Pearlman's plan. Richard Pfohl, general council for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, refuted Pearlman on numerous points at the conference forum, arguing that the plan would violate every international intellectual property law that Canada has signed in the last 100 years. It would also obliterate musicians' choices on how their music could be sold by conscripting them into a 5-cents-a-song system. And it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts, Pfohl said.

Pearlman said that Pfohl misunderstood the idea. Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?

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