Turtles all the way down

I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

So, real simple…for Christmas 2008 I want to be able to pay no more than $50 a month and download as much music as I want, from any artists that I want. Yes, I want flat-rate, all-you-can-eat, just like my Internet service and TV service. Furthermore, I want at least half of that money to go to the artists.

At least part of this is being seriously proposed by the Songwriters Association of Canada, for far less than I had even hoped for.

The Songwriters Association of Canada is proposing a $5-a-month licensing fee on every wireless and Internet account in the country, in exchange for unlimited access to all recorded music.

The deal would put $1 billion annually in the pockets of artists, publishers and record labels, according to the songwriters group. The money would be distributed to artists based on how frequently their music is swapped on-line; the more downloads, the more money the people responsible for the music would accrue. Big Champagne, a Los Angeles-based Internet monitoring service, says it can track file-swapping accurately enough to ensure that artists big and small would be compensated.

But there is one small catch…

Of course, it would require all the music labels to cooperate and make their vast back catalogs available on the Internet without any sort of copying restrictions. For this reason alone, it’s almost impossible to imagine this proposal ever gaining traction. The labels haven’t exhibited any sort of vision in dealing with the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital revolution; instead they agree only on their contempt of file-sharing.

If the downloads and file sharing of fringe artists can be tracked at least accurately enough for them to be compensated, then maybe this proposal has legs. Even if it doesn’t, at least there is movement in the right direction.