Turtles all the way down

Sony BMG has launched a new free music listening service.

One of the world’s biggest record labels has made its complete back catalogue of songs available free over the internet for the first time.

Sony BMG, which is the home to artists like Britney Spears and Michael Jackson, has signed a deal with the music website We7.

Users can listen to 250,000 songs for free but have to wait for a 10-second advert between each track.

This seems to complete the move of listener property rights from possession to use.

Traditional property law uses these three terms to describe different types of legal relationships between people and things. Ownership is the right to exclude others from possession and use. The labels or artists “own” their music.

Possession is type of right a listener would acquire when he buys an LP, CD, MP3 and so on. He can “possess” the music in the form that he bought it but does not have full ownership rights. For example a listener can sell his LP, CD, MP3 copy of the music, but he cannot copy, modify or broadcast the music itself.

But with digital music on the Internet, it is virtually impossible to prevent a listener from copying, modifying or broadcasting music that he possesses. So the labels are now adopting a use model. Use is the right to listen in a specific format under specific conditions. However to make up for this lesser degree of rights, the use model is fairly ubiquitous - if you have an Internet connection, you can use as much as you want.

Perhaps this is not such a bad idea. We’re rarely without the Internet, and as long as the music will stream to and play on a reasonably broad array of devices, listener rights are balanced against the new reality that music is no longer a scarce resource.

It also coincides with what I see as the coming move from listeners actually possessing a collection of music, and the associated inconvenience, to that of listeners essentially “borrowing” the music they want to hear, on demand. The latter is ultimately a more convenient model for today’s mobile population who just don’t want or need a lot of stuff.