Essay 3- Hypothecation Tax/Public Service Approach

Many echoes can be heard in political legislative bodies due to continuous rising of so-called music piracy these days. “Big” drummers have a lot to drum against that phenomenon but nothing to present to meet today’s challenges. A major silent revolution is going to be taking place within music industry in coming 15 years instead of 10 as I think.

Peer-to-peer technologies can’t be eliminated totally from net world while we have only few successful business models for digital distribution of music (iTunes etc.). On the other hand, technology geeks can hijack any kind of restrictions or “DRM” proposed by record labels. Illegal music downloaders across the globe can’t be punished unless having a so-called global “big brother” system as matter of fact. Business models presented by record labels till that date are not sufficient enough to address the problem fairly as real artists are given just pennies while record companies still get lion’s share. Except the first world’s citizens, people from second and third world countries would never like to spend as much money as record labels want in their proposed greedy business models. 1 dollar price for a song is nothing for a US citizen but a lot for an Indian citizen where average daily income is less than 2 dollars. Alternatively, not many artists have marketing and distribution experience and knowledge for their creations on the internet and ultimately they have to involve middle men.

Then, what is gonna happen in coming decade?

In that condition, where music piracy is getting space in political agendas of many political groups, legislative bodies would definitely come with some sort of “money distribution and collection model” for music industry (especially for individual artists)in coming years. I can’t predict the exact framework of this model but it would be somewhat like where official authorities would make it possible to impose a certain fee on each and every user of internet according to his or her usage of internet, keeping in mind the average income of that country’s citizens. These funds would be distributed later among all other actors of industry on certain basis. Authorities would make sure that real artists and creators are benefited from these collectives. This model relies on the assumption that access to information is a basic right of every human being. It’s not a statutory licensing model but a future glance in right direction. While many of these kinds of models are already being practiced by many governmental bodies i-e licensing fee for public TV and Radio, entertainment tax etc. unequal distribution of music money would be discouraged because of the presence of new social media technologies as people are getting more conscious about the fact that only some stakeholders in existing business models are getting richer but not the real artists and creators.