My point of view is that of an artist’s advocate.

While ubiquitous access would be great from a consumer standpoint, I would argue that it increases piracy, and is therefore exactly what the music industry is trying to avoid. Do you remember the DRM hoops that Apple had to jump through to bring the music industry to the table for iTunes?

I had not thought to run the numbers to get the $$ value of what $5/month would bring to the music industry. I’m glad you did. That’s a bit absurd, but coming from a group associated with the RIAA (who are popularly regarded as jack-booted thugs), I can’t say I am surprised at the initial demand.

My pie-in-the-sky solution? Collaborate with ALL of the players involved (including artists, music execs, pirates, consumers, downloaders, and EFF-types…did I forget anyone?) to determine what the real motivations of all parties are and use that information to help mitigate the free flow and commotitization of copyrighted material.

Given there are around 258 million wireless subscribers out there (cita.org), and 211 million broadband subscribers just in the US (http://tinyurl.com/y4nqus), if every bill, every month, for every user included $5, all you can eat, the music biz would be up around $30B / year, about double their best year.

My biggest concern is the user who doesn’t want music access at all. HOw do you tell that guy to suck it up and pay?

Alternatively I think instead of forcing folks, why not create the service that competes with free? I think if some of the music services out there could do a better job of allowing ubiquitous access across devices, people would opt to use them (aka rhapsody on pc, tivo, mobile, mp3 player).

Akamai engineering manager David Barrett, who spoke on the record as being opposed to the Warner Music sponsored music tax (more) last month, was fired on April 25, sources say.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/akamai-fires-engineer-who-spoke-out-against-music-tax/

I was stuck on the tracking aspect as well, but don’t think it would be too long before they approached Microsoft, AOL, and others to alter their respective media players to record and transmit that information. You could use ISBN or UPC information for correctly tagged songs, and existing music recognition technology to identify untagged music. The folks who care about privacy would hate this, of course.

Strategically, I think the larger hurdle would be the people that would try to game the system by setting up dozens (or hundreds) of systems to do nothing but to play their songs over and over again to claim a piece of the action. A quick download of an IP-masking program, and suddenly you could have a number one hit.

Stephen