Better Way of Music File Sharing

By Manabu Tokunaga

StokeMaster's Music Blog

http://stokemusic.blogspot.com/

We continue to hear about RIAA bringing lawsuits to students and other people who cannot obviously afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars in awards. Also the industry is trying to work with the government to mandate the installation software that will monitor peoples music usage on computers. I personally do not agree doing that is a solution to the problem.

Most musicians doing music to generate their income may be sympathetic to that, but on the other hands we tend to see only one side of the story that we want to hear. If you are a professional musician, you may tend to side RIAA, but if you are a music fan, you may think RIAA is an evil greedy organization.

So I did a bit more search on the network and found Electronic Fronteer (EF) web site on this topic: http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing

You may find this interesting because what they propose is to either use or start organizations like ASCAP and BMI who collect and distribute broadcast, in this case file sharing, payments to respective musicians.

According to the article, by collecting $5 to $10 from music fans per month and allowing them to do file sharing to their hearts content, the potential revenue it generates is significantly more for artists. Which I think is a great model especially for indepenent and individual musicians since more freedom for music fans to distribute music means a built-in promotion mechanism.

If you explore this site, it has many other useful information on music file sharing. As a professional musician, you should study this a bit as to where the industry and the digital public is heading to. Also I should remind you to join ASCAP or BMI if you have an album. Basically if you currently have your work released from commercial venues like Amazon, CD Baby etc., then you are very likely to be accepted.

What do you think about this?

http://stokemusic.blogspot.com/ (c) 2010 Manabu Tokunaga