RIAA: "ISPs should pay for music swapping"

[Grojlach]

"ISPs should pay for music swapping"

The chair of the RIAA has a radical solution to the perceived problem with file-swapping, but some in the industry feel it may be unworkable.
A top music industry representative said on Saturday that telecommunications companies and Internet service providers will be asked to pay up for giving their customers access to free song-swapping sites.
The music industry is in a tailspin with global sales of CDs expected to fall 6 percent in 2003, its fourth consecutive annual decline. A major culprit, industry watchers say, is online piracy.
Now, the industry wants to hit the problem at its source -- ISPs.
"We will hold ISPs more accountable," said Hillary Rosen, chair and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference in Cannes on the French Riviera.
"Let's face it. They know there's a lot of demand for broadband simply because of the availability (of file-sharing)," Rosen said.
As broadband access in homes has increased across the Western world, so has the activity on file-sharing services.
The RIAA is a powerful trade body that has taken a number of file-swapping services, including the now-defunct Napster, to court in an effort to shut them down.
Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to customers who frequent these file-swapping services.
Mario Mariani, senior vice president of media and access at Tiscali, Europe's third largest ISP, dismissed the notion, calling it impossible to enforce.
"The peer-to-peer sites are impossible to fight. In any given network, peer-to-peer traffic is between 30 (percent) and 60 percent of total traffic. We technically cannot control such traffic," he said.
Rosen's other suggestions for fighting online piracy were more conciliatory.
She urged the major music labels, which include Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI, Universal Music and Bertelsmann's BMG, to ease licensing restrictions, develop digital copyright protections for music and invest more in promoting subscription download services.
Pressplay and MusicNet, the online services backed by the majors, plus independent legitimate services such as Britain's Wippit.com, sounded somewhat optimistic about their long-term chances to derail free services such as Kazaa and Morpheus.
But they also acknowledged they cannot compete with the "free" players until the labels clear up the licensing morass that keeps new songs from being distributed online for a fee.
Officials from Pressplay and MusicNet, which are in their second year of operation, declined to disclose how many customers they have.
"We haven't really started yet," said Alan McGlade, chief executive of MusicNet, when asked about his subscriber base.
Michael Bebel, chief executive of Pressplay, said his customer tally is in the tens of thousands. He added that the firm, backed by Universal and Sony, could expand into Canada in the first half of the year, its second market after the United States. He did not have a timeframe for Europe.
Meanwhile, Kazaa and Morpheus claim tens of millions of registered users who download a wide variety of tracks for free.
Rosen hailed a recent US court decision which ruled that Kazaa, operated by Australian-based technology firm Sharman Networks, could be sued in the United States, as an important legal step to halting the activities of file-sharing services.
"It's clear to me these companies are profiting to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. They must be held accountable," Rosen said.

Source: ZDNet

[ 01-21-2003, 05:57 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

[Lavindathar]

Better them paying it than me

[Grojlach]

Originally posted by Lavindathar: Better them paying it than me

Actually, I think the providers will just pass the costs on to their customers if this is really going to happen, by making their services a lot more expensive.

[ 01-21-2003, 06:10 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

[Djinn Raffo]

It is what would happen probably..

Recording companys are trying to hold back change. They should realize that their hold on the industry is slipping and either change with the times (ie: get into the fileswapping business) or die out. Trying to stop people from using a better way of doing things, the way they want to do things, is like trying to hold that crack in the dam with your finger.

[Yorick]

Great idea. Glad to hear it. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Chewbacca]

Somebody has to pay it and right now its the music labels and retailers. 500 music stores will close in America this year partly due to piracy, bootlegging, cd-burning and file-sharing. The Record labels are responsible as well.

The days of marketing singles to sell albums is over for the record labels and they don't know what to do. They are partially to blame themselves for not adapting to changing business conditions and for years of inflating their prices along with some retailers. Consumer backlash is hell.

I feel for the artists, street reps,and music store employees that are losing livelyhood from the decline of music sales. They have just been taken along for the ride.

BTW: I'm a music store employee. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 01-21-2003, 10:22 PM: Message edited by: Chewbacca ]

[Yorick]

Record companies are hardly signing anyone at the moment. The industry is at an all time low.

[Leonis]

Interesting development. Not sure whether this is a good idea or a bad one that's the best (for the Music Industry) by default...

No mention of how they would account for who gets what. So a dinosaur, or a new artist being pushed might get the buck$ at the expense of a heavily downloaded but obscure act.

What about individuals and independant record companies I wonder? Somehow this smells like it could be a handshake between ISPs and Record Companies and the little battlers get shut out yet again...???

Who does the RIAA represent? All US record companies or just the majors?
Or do they represent artists?

Unless the Rights Associations of the performers and writers etc also get involved this could be a very biased way of distributing the proceeds.

[Grungi]

if the music industry wasnt corrupt and all about money then CDs would cost alot less be affordable and far more people would buy them, and filesharing would hardly be a problem, unfortunately the music industry only has itself to blame for all the problems, releasing an album to get the best publicity results in an album with 2 good singles and 10 crap songs these days, it used to be an album had almost all quality songs, now they just make fillers to be able to sell it quick whilst the publicity machine is rolling, the whole system these days is just revolving around quick artists who will appear make 2 hit singles, sell an album then disappear again netting quick profits, and only the bigger record labels win out, the small ones go under because they cant afford to get it wrong.

i no longer buy music at all, i download a few songs on kazaa, only the ones i really like, and thats normally older songs, not much released these days interests me. I download with no guilt because i would buy the albums anyway its only one song from each band normally, and its impossible to find the singles for them as they are too old, so noones losing any money from me. Only time id ever buy an album now is if id listened to it already and almost every song was good, even if i had already downloaded it, then i would actually buy a copy, but for that to happen it would have to be good.

[Melusine]

Originally posted by Yorick: Great idea. Glad to hear it. [img]smile.gif[/img]

I disagree... all that would happen is that ISPs charge their customers more, and Internet connections get more expensive for everyone, including the people who don't download music... or am I missing something? I don't see how that is in any way fair. It does provide the money to make reparations to musicians who have been harmed by filesharing, but the money doesn't come from the right place.