I've been thinking about the problems of Spotify and illegal downloading overnight, and after a bit of early hours brainstorming this is a hypothetical solution that I've come up with, I'm dreaming a bit here, but all this is possible from a technical standpoint.
First of all, I have a feeling that due to the emergence of cloud based technologies, that over time services like Spotify might overtake traditional download services.
If I was going to create a Spotify/iTunes style service myself, this is what I'd do.
To start with, make it monthly subscription only, maybe release a free version later if viable, but monthly subscription only would be preferable.
Charge £10 a month, of which the company would get around £2.50, the rest would be divided between artists. (note I know there are licensing complications here with regards to labels/songwriters and artists)
The service would keep track of every song listened to by the listener, at the end of each month it would calculate a suggested division of money between artists and and display this to the listener.
The listener could then change the balance as they see fit if they think an artist deserves a higher percentage of the proceeds, there would be a minimum percentage limit, so each artist would always get something.
There could also be an e-tip jar, so listeners could tip artists who they think deserve extra.
It could be taken even further, artists could display publicly within the app how much they are due to be paid in royalties each month, with goals listed for how much they need to continue making music, and additional funding goals.
This would give much more power to the listener, at the moment the average person has no clue how much an artist is really paid for each purchase, and I have a feeling a lot of people would be shocked to know how low traditional royalty payments can be.
One possible flaw with this idea, is that by default, the more music artists listened to by a listener, the less would go to each individual artist, but my theory is that it would balance out, for instance, if someone only listens to 4 different artists over the month, the entire £7.50 would be divided between the 4 artists.
Now if you take the Spotify model, this would only relate to streaming, but from a technical standpoint this is rather silly, in digital terms, streaming and downloading send basically the same data to the user, it's just with streaming the application has been told not to save the data.
Maybe a different approach is needed, NOTE: crazy and scary idea coming up…
Why not think of downloads and streaming as the same? Don't charge directly for the download, instead pay the artist a royalty for each track played, no matter it it was streamed or downloaded, think of it as a performance.
This has an interesting side effect, both illegally downloaded music, and maybe even music imported from CD could be included. I suspect some artists/labels would be very excited to think that they could be continued to be paid for each play of a song.
At the same time this would encourage artists to create better albums, if people are still listening to your album 1,5 or 10 years later, you still get a cut.
The service could recommend new music that is similar to your tastes, and the algorithm could be weighted to prioritise new and independent artists.
It could alert you to when artists in your playlist are playing gigs, and gig ticket purchases should as handled from within the service, it should be made a easy as possible to buy tickets.
It should make it just as easy to purchase physical copies of albums you like form within the app too.
Anyway, this is just a hypothetical idea, I'm sure it has plenty of flaws. I welcome any comments.
The original post by 6 Day Riot that got me thinking: http://www.myspace.com/6dayriot/blog/541950902
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