No one likes to pay for music – or much else
In a recent MacLean’s magazine opinion piece, Andrew Potter advocated that the only way to save music was to tax Internet providers. I’d like to link you to the article but the MacLean’s web site is among the worst on the net and apparently does not contain any actual content. (Update: I finally found the article online (thanks Google) here)
Anyhow, here is my reply to this kind of backward thinking…
As someone who has followed copyright issues with a great deal of interest since the government first devised the ridiculous idea that it should create taxes and hand them over to specific industries (like the blank media levy), I couldn’t help but cringe as I read the endorsement of an ISP tax.
The article simply spreads the same old dogma from the various recording industry groups and completely misses the bigger picture.
The existing recording industry built upon distribution of music on media is a business model that is dead. Because the internet is an infinetly more efficient and effective way to distribute music, any business model built on distribution can not be saved. And good riddance.
Having completely failed to adapt to new technology and distribution methods, the industry is desperate for a government bailout in the form of a tax on their competition (the internet). This just postpones the inevitable and in the interim, hands millions of dollars over to primarily American owned recording labels while penalizing perfectly legitimate activities such as burning data to CDs, or browsing the web.
In the article, Andrew chastises the National Post for not putting forth solutions stating that the “status quo must be fine.” In fact it is!
The status quo is called “capitalism”. Market forces deal nicely with unworkable business models, except when governments intervene to prop-up the broken ones as he is advocating.
In the short term nobody is disputing that artists who bet on record labels for their income are hurting. What you overlook is that the longer we prop-up the old models, the longer it will take for the new models to grab hold. And even worse, an ISP levy taxes the new models to prop-up the old, a double-disincentive!
At the invention of the television set, should we have taxed television programming to prop up radio dramas?
The industry also likes to perpetuate the myth that the death of the recording industry means the death of music. It does not. In fact, the monolithic recording industry has always existed as hindrance to the diversity of music.
Now that the industry has begun to collapse, advocates of the old system of music distribution have conveniently overlooked the explosion of small independent record labels now beginning to thrive on the Internet.
Will one of these small labels emerge as the future of music? Or perhaps Apple? It’s too early to say but one thing I can say with certainty; an ISP tax handed over to record labels is NOT a path to the future.
