The struggling music industry is looking to new technology solutions that could help it regain some lost ground and make music consumption more convenient and affordable for fans.
They include a new delivery model that could eventually offer music downloading as an add-on to one’s Internet bill. The idea, called Choruss, is being developed for use at universities by music industry consultant Jim Griffin in conjunction with Warner Music Group.
A large portion of illegal music sharing activity has occurred on college campuses. Choruss essentially would place a music royalty fee on students’ tuition bills in exchange for unrestricted access to a body of songs for downloading on university networks.
The monies would then be distributed to the copyright holders by an independent, nonprofit organization as compensation for use, a licensing model similar to the method used to collect royalty money from radio stations.
Griffin will present his plan for Choruss next Tuesday during Nashville’s Digital Summit, a two-day conference that will bring together dozens of speakers from media, marketing, technology, telecommunications, music and entertainment at Belmont University.
The project appears to have gained support of most major record labels, now that the Recording Industry Association of America has dropped a five-year strategy of suing individuals for illegally downloading music.
Music consumers swap about 1 billion files each month on peer-to-peer networks, according to the tracking service Big Champagne. And CD sales, likely the last physical music format that will be sold in stores, have fallen 45 percent from their peak, to 428 million last year.
The idea could be expanded to the mass market, by adding an optional fee — probably between $5 and $10 — onto customers’ monthly cable or phone bills.
The fee would be voluntary for consumers and would protect them from legal action by copyright holders.
While Warner says the proposal is probably months from implementation, it’s been discussed among the Internet cognoscenti for several years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California-based nonprofit founded in 1990, has come out strongly in favor of such an “all you can eat” subscription model, saying it fairly compensates creators. The foundation estimates such a model could collect $3 billion annually.
Critics have called it a “tax” and pointed out the difficulty in getting every record label on board.
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