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At 4:51 PM -0700 6/23/02, Kim Flint wrote:
[a bunch of stuff that makes good sense from a capitalist perspective.]
I'm going to bow out of this debate at this point because I think
that several of you have eloquently argued for my position, but in a
nutshell:
For many of us the Internet has promised to be a viable alternative
to the entrenched corporate model of the music industry. An important
part of the Do It Yourself (DIY) alternative is the dissemination of
our music through on-line commerce, mp3 downloads, and streaming
audio. A major component of promotion is the community of small
Webcasters who are more interested in the music than in the music
business. While some of these people may be the fools and
incompetents that Kim suggests, I think that a lot of them are simply
enthusiasts or are deliberately small businesses for whom the
RIAA/CARP royalties will make the difference between continuing and
not.
When I ran the figures for a small "hobbyist" Web station with 100
listeners I found that the royalties could be in the neighborhood of
$10,000 per annum. That might be peanuts for a commercial operation,
but if one wished to avoid commercial sponsorship it would really be
too much. The alternative to paying the royalties is to obtain
individual releases from all the artists to be Webcast, and this
added burden of paperwork would probably cause a lot of marginal
operations to shut down as well.
My position is that one of the prime virtues of the Web is its
ability to support a large community of "marginal" on-line
publishers. The sheer variety of obscure and diverse material that is
made available through such a grass-roots system is to the benefit of
all of us (enriching the "gene pool"). In contrast to this we have
the "commercial" publishers who have to be concerned with the bottom
line, with the resulting proliferation of ads and boiling down of
programming to only the most popular material ("inbreeding").
--
______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com
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