Reznor goes on to say that he might favor an ISP tax as a means of ensuring that artists benefit when their songs are downloaded for free on file-sharing networks, after being leaked before their release on a physical CD.
"I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, 'All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up you're a** if you want and it's $5 on your cable bill,'" Reznor told News.com.
Link (digitalmediawire)
All I can say is that I hope this is an out of context quote from a slimy reporter trying to put words in someone's mouth. This kind of thing really stings me.
This is like the time that I realized that Beck was a Scientologist. I loved his music so much it hurt me to find out he was such a freak. It might have removed a little bit of my ability to enjoy his music. As internal defense from the truth I now believe that Beck is into Scientology just as an avant-garde statement. "Look at me, I'm so cool I think there's the frozen souls of space aliens in my head"
Now I find out that Trent Reznor want to sit around collecting royalties from an ISP tax? Maybe he's just saying this so that some crazy libertarian will assassinate him there by boosting him to cultural god like status? I think it would be better for me to just stop reading news stories about people I respect.
1 comment:
I fail to see the error of this idea. Eventually the CD will die and everyone will know how to download music for "free".
The economics for the artist will work out like this:
1. The artist (or record company) will front the cost of recording the material.
2. The material will be released on the internet.
3. ISP's will collect money (on some plans according to usage)from people downloading the album. You see, there is no such thing as downloading something for free.
4. The artist receives no direct return on his investment, which would be acceptable if nobody was profiting, but in this case one party is eating the cost of producing something and another party (who has invested nothing) is taking the profit.
Of course there are complications to this idea. How do you know what people are downloading? And if you could know, wouldn't someone just write some code that would hide this info?
The only option for the artist (probably how this will all shake out eventually) is to stop considering recorded music a source of income and treat it as a promotional item to draw people to the live show. Smart artists like Madonna (I said smart, not good) are already going this route.
My advice to music retailers: get out of music retail, invest in live music venues, concert promotion, etc.
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