Rekrul: agreed, the price is crucial. Publishers would have to abandon what I think are frankly unrealistic expectations of retail pricing — $.99/track (or $15 per kindle download) isn’t going to fly. And as you suggest, much depends on which classes of content would participate. But how much do you pay for cable now? How much did you spend on CD’s 15 years ago (if you’re old enough to remember the pre-P2P era for music)? Personally I think $5/mo for a music-only non-DRM service would be downright fantastic.

As for your question: do we really want a world where everything is permeated with advertising? Yes, actually we do want it for that is the world we live in. No one drinks a can of “soda”. They drink Coke, Pepsi, RC Cola, A&W Rootbeer, etc. They don’t drive around cars that don’t have the automaker’s logos on them. In fact, nameless or generic-name products on the small and big screen jar people and hurt the suspension of disbelief.

Scott, I checked out your paper, and if I’m not mistaken it proposes advertising as the solution. It’s true that ads, sponsorships, product placements and the like can provide some revenue. But it’s becoming clear that this revenue stream is so meager it doesn’t even support the operations of a distributor — see Spiralfrog, Pandora — much less provide money for creators. And from an experience perspective, do we really want a world where everything is permeated with advertising? Scott, I agree with a lot of the forecasts in your paper, but when you talk about how fiction writers will have to compensate for the loss of retail sales revenue by using product placement in their novels, well, I suspect a lot of fiction readers will agree with me that they don’t want to live in that world.

To my mind, it comes down to a question of what sort of society we want. Do we want to live in a world where creators of content can’t make money from what they create? We don’t have to. That’s what the blanket licensing option is about.

There are other business models that can profit from p2p. I proposed one in a white paper (“The P2P Revolution”) in 2003 and it gives away entertainment content for free. Here’s a link to it: http://www.nonesuch.org/p2prevolution.pdf

Unfortunately due to our over bloated government, this industry has the ability to impose its failed business model longer then the others before it were able to.

If one looks at how technology will reshape the media-distribution system, one can look at the success Trent Reznor and his collaboration project, NIN, has succeeded without having a label or industry to market and distribute his media

http://vodpod.com/watch/1342866-my-midemnet-presentation-trent-reznor-and-the-formula-for-

This presentation is the wake up call to the media labels that their time is at an end, and describes the path where individuals will have the freedom to share original content on their own terms and make money the way they want to.

Record companies should try and squeeze more money out of consumers by providing more value. $5 fee per subscriber per month is not providing any more value.

Of all of these fees currently being collected world wide, it would be interesting to know how much is actually going back to the rights holder. It looks like there is another company just muscling into the value chain but providing no more value to the consumer.

Such a scheme might benefit Rights holders with huge popular libraries as they will take the lions share of the revenue. Small independent holders, who really use the internet for low cost distribution would see next to nothing from this.

TK