>I think the music industry has a year or two to implement the first option. If they don't, Oink 2* will be born, decentralised, completely P2P and un-shutdownable, and then the age of paying for sound recordings of any type will come to an end forever.
I'm no pirate, but I hope the music industry takes its sweet time.
If that happens, say goodbye to your worldwide tours, and consequently, your favorite band from australia (or somewhere) coming to montana to tour. Right now, the labels pay for that kind of thing. Without the labels, the band has to make a huge amount of money on sales, and we've just described an impossible situation. A band is not going to make enough money unless they have funding (not unlike a startup).
Radiohead did this because they'd already been successful in the past, that's why fans were willing to pay for their music even if it was given away. It might work for a new band, but if ALL bands are on equal footing, I don't think the income will be as high per band.
I've hears the opposite too. That merchandising and touring is where artists make money, and recorded music is where the labels make money. I wonder which it is.
It's the former. Tours are where artists make music.
That's not necessarily a good thing. It emphasizes musicians who are energetic over musicians who favor craftsmanship. If that's where money came from, we'd never have had latter Beatles, or nearly any classical music.
Hopefully a model is found which lets people make money from sales. Otherwise, music's going to keep plummeting down.
"Hopefully a model is found which lets people make money from sales. Otherwise, music's going to keep plummeting down."
Sorry to repeat myself but the core problem here is bigger than just "people not paying for music". There are many other sectors facing this, perhaps most notably quality journalism. Good news reporting is hard and requires a lot of effort and resources. And the number of people willing to pay for news shrinks daily. Sound familiar?
The core problem is the disconnect between the material and the information worlds in terms of scarcity. Simply put, scarcity exists in the former but not the latter. This leaves anyone relying on scarcity in the latter to generate leverage against the former in a bad position.
This trend is inevitable and, while it might not seem like it right now, good, I believe. Obviously, the best outcome is for popularity to be its own reward - you can see the seeds of this in the open source movement, but it exists elsewhere as well. Social standing is a genuine motivating factor. Absent material necessity, I believe it would be enough.
Still, here we are in a world where we still have to pay actual money for our rent and food. We need a stopgap measure. Elsewhere I've proposed that governments establish "patronage funds" for artists, distributed by popularity. Basically take 1% of revenue and distribute it to artists/authors according to (reliable) measures of how useful their population finds them. In the current economic climate, however, this kind of idea is kind of unlikely.
It's a problem that needs to be solved, though, and it will be solved, somehow.
Not to disrespect your theory, but basic profit on usefulness or popularity is a very, very, very bad idea. Art is not necessarily useful, nor should it have to be popular. That encourages groupthink. That means that if you're an artist with a brilliant idea that's never been done before, even if you're blazingly ahead of your time you won't get anything unless you cater to the masses.
You mention open source, which is a perfect example. Open source projects are rarely good. Firefox is perhaps the fourth best browser on the market, after Chrome, Opera, and Safari. OpenOffice is terrible. They're popular because most people lack enough knowledge of usability to understand just how bad they are, but they're not very good. At most they're functional.
Patronage does not work in the public sector. That's what private sectors are best for, actually: the people with money to pay for musicians are much more likely to have good taste in what they become patrons of. That suddenly makes it a matter of personal taste, which is a more effective model than relying on the masses, who are almost universally wrong in their choices.
I think demonoid (ignoring all questions of its legality) already does Oink-2.
It has a huge incentive for users to behave (I wonder if this would work for HN too):
+ registration is for free, but you need someone to invite you.
+ if you do something that causes you to get banned, the person who invited you gets banned, too. Makes people think a few times before doing something stupid.
Demonoid is nothing compared to the former Oink. It's a disorganised mess. Ditto TPB.
The real Oink 2 will be a properly indexed distributed web of trust system using something like BT/freenet and DHT and some kind of reputation system. There are early implementations going in that direction, but nothing really working yet. It's absolutely possible, though. All of the components are right there, just waiting to be linked up.
It's ridiculous to think this isn't coming. It's hard, yes, but it's also inevitable. Any business model that depends on people not being able to easily find and download small files, like say audio or even video these days, is screwed in maybe 2 or 3 years.
I don't think I'm predicting the future here, I think I'm stating the obvious. Hell, I have a side project along these lines, and I'm very far from the only one. Everyone wants something like this. It's just a matter of time.
I'm no pirate, but I hope the music industry takes its sweet time.