Let me make it clear, first of all, that I have no desire to save the music industry. The music industry consists largely of blood-sucking vampires who abuse, deceive, and exploit raw talent. A pox on all of their houses.
But, I do want artists to be paid for their work.
It is clear that there is no way to stop people from using the internet and their computers to freely copy music. It's too easy. Even if you wanted to pay for the music, it is easier to download a copy from the internet than it is to buy a CD at your local record store.
But if the music industry can no longer sell enough CD's to pay their artists, how will the artists be paid?
Here's my solution: the government should impose a surcharge on personal all internet accounts. The surcharge will be collected by all Internet Service Providers and remitted to an organization managed by representatives of the musical artists community. All artist who wish to be paid for their music will have the option of joining or not joining. This organization will find a way to track the volume of downloads for each member artist. Based on these numbers, each artist will be compensated directly from the fund.
The amount of the surcharge will probably only have to be about $2 or $3 a month or less.
The beauty of this plan is that the government is not required to monitor anybody's downloads, or try to regulate internet usage. All it has to do is impose the fee and ensure that the money is funneled directly to the artists (and not to the parasitical music industry itself).
The only problem with this proposed system is that someone will have to develop a way of monitoring downloads and tabulating the numbers for each artist. I rather think that the makers of Napster, faced with multi-billion dollar law suits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would be more than happy to comply. As for all those people who are paranoid of government intervention, it should be stressed that the monitoring is done by the proposed artists' agency and not by the government or the recording industry.
There. Done. A remarkably simple and effective solution. I hereby copyright it.
All I ask is mere .01% of the take.
