What is the purpose of copyright? From the constitution "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
To maximize the creation of intellectual goods, we should pay artists enough money to have them enthusiastically create them, but no more. Of course, this money should only get paid to people who are creating works that people want to consume.
Our music copyright system has many problems, but I think it's fairly remarkable that we've stumbled on what I believe is fair prices for it: $10/mo/user or $15/mo/family for access to a full catalog, or ad-supported free for access to radio-like streaming. Ad-supported free is pretty meagre, but it was the government that set those rates, so we'll assume that's fair for the sake of this argument.
While dividing that $10/mo up by play seems fair, it doesn't seem maximal. A few artists get millions, most are lucky to get enough to get enough to buy a cup of coffee. They might be making a meagre living touring, but once they decide to have a family they give it up and get a real job.
I'd love to see log scaled payouts to address the problem. So if you A had 10x as many plays as B and 100x as many plays as C, A would get paid 2x as much as B and 3x as much as C. (using log10 for illustration -- the natural logarithm or some other lower base would probably be better).
Such a change would be relatively easy to make for compulsory-licensed music such as Pandora and other "Internet Radio". It would be harder to make for the voluntarily-licensed music such as Spotify, though.
To maximize the creation of intellectual goods, we should pay artists enough money to have them enthusiastically create them, but no more. Of course, this money should only get paid to people who are creating works that people want to consume.
Our music copyright system has many problems, but I think it's fairly remarkable that we've stumbled on what I believe is fair prices for it: $10/mo/user or $15/mo/family for access to a full catalog, or ad-supported free for access to radio-like streaming. Ad-supported free is pretty meagre, but it was the government that set those rates, so we'll assume that's fair for the sake of this argument.
While dividing that $10/mo up by play seems fair, it doesn't seem maximal. A few artists get millions, most are lucky to get enough to get enough to buy a cup of coffee. They might be making a meagre living touring, but once they decide to have a family they give it up and get a real job.
I'd love to see log scaled payouts to address the problem. So if you A had 10x as many plays as B and 100x as many plays as C, A would get paid 2x as much as B and 3x as much as C. (using log10 for illustration -- the natural logarithm or some other lower base would probably be better).
Such a change would be relatively easy to make for compulsory-licensed music such as Pandora and other "Internet Radio". It would be harder to make for the voluntarily-licensed music such as Spotify, though.