OSNews

Asking a per-song payment is the wrong way to do it. Distribution of music over the Internet costs pretty much the same whether I download one album a month or 50. And I want to be able to download 500 a month just because it does not cost anyone a significantly more. Like that song? Download (or have access to) the whole discography of the band just because it's convenient.

I have a pretty basic model in mind - it's so simple that it must have been laid out by someone else a long time ago. Here it goes:
Customers pay a fixed monthly fee ($10? $20? $50? does not really matter here. I'll use $10 as an example.
For that $10 I can listen (download or stream) to anything I want. At the months end, my $10 (or whatever's left after all the costs are covered) is divided among rights' owners according to my usage stats. Say the costs (service provider's fee, taxes, bandwidth, etc.) were $3. I downloaded 3 albums by Pixies, 1 by Massive Attack and 1 by Bonobo. Pixies get 3/5 of my $7 and so on.
Once I unsubscribe, I lose the right to listen to any of that music.

I don't mind paying a considerable amount of money for music. I just won't participate in a crippleware-like system where I'm denied an access to the World's entire music collection.
Please show me some flaws of this solution.

Until something similar is implemented, I'm gonna use a wonderful BT site that gives me access to pretty much every album I search for in every form one could wish (different kinds of lossy and lossless formats, different editions of albums, etc.).

Edited 2011-04-16 21:33 UTC