The following is a proposal for an alternative to the existing
system for paying for music. By permission of David Barrett, 2008.
As promised, here's my proposal for helping fans help artists without
further criminalization or prosecution of widespread behavior, without
imprecise sampling or global demographic estimation, without
mandating an invasive surveillance infrastructure, and without trying to break
the basic laws of physics.
David's Voluntary Payment Plan
------------------------------
David Barrett
dbarrett@quinthar.com
2008/3/18
I. Example of Operation
=======================
First, here's a quick walkthrough of how the system would be used in
common operation:
A. Adding a new song
Alice, an independent musician, selects from one of several music
registrars, creates a free account, uploads her track in the FLAC
format, assigns it a name, optionally organizes it in one or more
albums, and is done. The entire operation is free, takes less than 10
minutes, and requires no personal information beyond an email address.
B. Downloading a song
Bob, a music aficionado, browses a variety of free music outlets for
new
songs. One of those locations has an active online community around
indie music, and the forum is buzzing around a new musician, Alice.
The
forum links to a page where Alice's music can be downloaded -- he
clicks
the link, chooses the format and bitrate, and downloads the MP3 for
free. Though the website allows low-quality 128Kbps versions of the
song to be downloaded or streamed straight from the server, for cost
reasons it only allows 256Kbps and FLAC versions to be downloaded via a
P2P network. He's all about quality, so he whips out his favorite P2P
application and downloads the FLAC.
C. Listening to a song.
When the download completes, Bob copies the file several places -- his
laptop, his home stereo, his iPod, his phone -- all of which support
the
completely standard, unprotected audio format.
D. Supporting Alice
Bob decides that he really likes Alice's music and wants to see more of
it get played. He has several ways to help that happen:
- One way is to go back to the website where he downloaded the music in
the first place. There there's a small (but growing) forum where Alice
fans discuss her music, links to other music by Alice, recommendations
of other music by Alice, and so on. Furthermore, there's a quick note
by Alice herself saying "Hi, I'm trying to raise $1000 to fund my next
album, please help me out!" Bob sees she's up to $950 right now. He's
got a few options of how to help. One is to just do a simple cash
contribution, one is to help raise up to $1000 (at $950 so far) with
the
caveat that if she doesn't raise the full amount within a set
timeframe,
the money is given back. Another is a subscription of $1/mo that gets
his name put on a list of True Fans. Yet another is to buy the last
limited-edition autographed copy of Alice's first Vinyl album for $50.
All of these options can be paid with PayPal or a credit card.
- Another way is to use a feature built into iTunes and his iPod to
auto-support any any song he listens to more than 5 times, to the
default (but adjustable) amount of $0.05/listen. Similarly, whenever
he
looks at the face of his iPod to remember who he's listening to, he
sees
Alice's message that she's trying to raise $1000 and is up to $950.
Likewise, he sees there's one more copy of the limited edition vinyl
available.
Ultimately, he decides to go for the vinyl recommended by his iPod. He
goes to iTunes, chooses "open musician's website", and buys the vinyl
online.
E. Getting paid
When Alice signed up, she had no idea her music would be such a hit.
But her inbox is full of messages, donations, and all her vinyl copies
(which she hasn't even made yet) have already been sold.
- Getting to work, she uploads the cover art design and asks her
registrar to press the given number of vinyl records and FedEx to her
for signing. When she sends them back, the company redistributes them
to the customers who purchased them, and the money is deposited into
her
account.
- As for how to get her money, she has a couple options. The classic
approach is to just give her direct deposit information and it's
deposited via the ACH network (automated clearing house). Another is
to
give her PayPal information. She doesn't like any of those options, so
she goes with a third option of just having a reloadable prepaid Visa
card sent her way -- any money added to her account is instantly
available for use at any merchant, or even to be withdrawn from any
ATM.
II. Music Registrars
====================
Core to this plan is the notion of "music registrars". Like DNS
registrars (from which this draws inspiration), there are many and all
provide compatible functionality while competing aggressively on price
and value-added services. Musicians are free at any time to sign up
with any number of registrars, or move tracks between registrars at a
later date. But each track ultimately maps back to a single registrar
that manages (at least) standardized metadata operations around that
track. In essence, a registrar provides *at least* the following:
- Account creation. Generally with a username/password, though
optionally with more secure mechanisms (multi-factor authentication,
PKI, etc).
- FLAC storage. For every track managed, permanently store a master
FLAC version.
- Metadata hosting. For a given track, host its authoritative name,
artist, album, etc. (essentially, ID3 tags) in one or more languages.
Though not strictly required, in general a registrar will offer a wide
variety of additional services, including some subset of:
- Transcoding and hosting. Generates a variety of file formats from
the
master FLAC, including MP3, Flash, etc. and hosts them on the web and
P2P networks.
- Payment gateway. Accepts payments from fans according to a variety
of
payment protocols and securely deposits into the artist's account.
- Fan management. Forums, blogs, RSS feeds, and all the accouterments
of web 2.0.
- eCommerce. Anything ranging from a Yahoo Store-like checkout system
to a cafepress-style product generation assistant.
- Recommendation engines, playlist management, webcasting radio
stations, promotion services, gig management, tour assistance, discount
music equipment, etc. Basically, each registrar will attempt to
provide
artists with a complete one-stop-shop of all things they could possibly
need to be a happy, successful musician.
A service exists that lets anybody look up the latest metadata on any
track. (Typically you would just download the metadata straight from
its registrar, but there would be a mechanism to determine who the
registrar is -- if any -- for an unknown piece of music.) This service
uses a combination of servers hosted by the registrars, as well as
servers hosted by an independent organization that manages the
registrars themselves. This organization is focused exclusively on the
operation of enabling transfers of music between registrars, resolving
disputes between registrars (and between users and registrars), and
authoritatively stating which registrar is currently managing which
track. This organization is funded through annual re-certification
fees
paid to the organization by registrars.
One operation that is particularly interesting is: how does this
organization uniquely identify each track in order to guarantee that
each is only being represented by a single registrar? The answer is by
using waveform fingerprints. Each registrar holds onto the master FLAC
for every song in its management. Upon adding a new song, it uploads a
"fingerprint" of the song to the master organization, which then
confirms no other song has the same signature. (If there is a conflict,
the organization investigates and resolves it.) The organization will
make the choice as to which signature function to use (and it needn't
be
perfect, it's just a tool in helping proactively identify and resolve
conflicts), and it can at any point decide to use a new function by
simply having all registrars re-fingerprint all FLACs with the new
function. Again, the fingerprinting doesn't need to be (and won't be)
perfect -- it's just a flag that triggers manual corrective action.
The
better the function, the less wasted work.
III. MP3, ID3, and Metadata
===========================
In general practice, a musician would upload a track's master FLAC to
her music registrar, and the registrar would generate a series of MP3s
that have all the ID3 tags correctly set. The musician could then do
whatever she liked with those MP3s -- email them, post them to P2P
networks, post them on forums, burn them to CDs, etc -- and the ID3
tags
would just be carried along with them.
However, the metadata can be indexed, distributed, and used in any way,
even outside of MP3s -- the same information can be downloaded from the
registrar at any time.
IV. Music Metadata and Player Support
=====================================
In general, the metadata associated with a particular song can be any
arbitrary name/value pair that the owner sees fit to associate with the
song. There are no strict requirements or limitations on what sort of
metadata must be associated. Similarly, players can choose to support
all, none, or any subset of the metadata contained within a file. Any
metadata not understood should be simply ignored. Some types of
metadata include:
- The standard ID3 tags: The obvious metadata includes artist name,
song name, album, genre, and everything else you typically see in MP3
players. Example:
Name: Before Today
Artist: Everything but the Girl
Album: Walking Wounded
Track: 1
- Unique song GUID: A globally unique identifier assigned by the
registrar to this song. A given song would have the same GUID across
all bitrates and encodings, for example, but different mixes of this
song would have different GUIDs. In general, all MP3s with the same
GUID should have the same waveform fingerprint; similarly, in general,
no two tracks with different GUIDs should have the same waveform
fingerprint. This GUID can be used by the player, website, or other
service for whatever purpose it likes (it's handy to have a key by
which
to index the song). Example:
GUID: s8d9fgfud6s6d6f8ds8sys6s65
- Metadata URL: A new tag would be a HTTP URL from which the latest
authoritative metadata can always be downloaded in some standard format
(I'd propose JSON, others might argue XML, but the specific choice is
TBD). Any player or service can download the latest metadata for this
track at any time, possibly rewriting the MP3 itself with the new
information. Example:
MetadataURL: http://mytunes.com/meta/s8d9fgfud6s6d6f8ds8sys6s65
- Payment information: A series of descriptions through which this
artist can be automatically compensated according to some predetermined
protocol. There will be many different payment protocols (and new ones
all the time), some of which might include direct deposits into bank
accounts, charging to phone bills, reverse charges to prepaid credit
cards, paypal transfers, eGold transfers, or whatever. It's likely
each
registrar would offer one or more of the most well-known payment
protocols by default, but there is no restriction on somebody coming
out
with a new payment protocol and then associating it with their song.
(More details on this below.) Example:
Payment: ach://,
Payment: paypal://
Payment: http://mytunes.com/s8d9fgfud6s6d6f8ds8sys6s65
Payment: raise://amount=$1000¤t=$950&by=2008/4/1
- Hash: Though there's no strict requirement that a given song be
distributed universally as a binary-identical MP3 for each given
bitrate, it's reasonable to assume that this convergence would occur.
Thus a valid piece of metadata would be the hash of a given encoding,
which can be used by the player to verify that the file hasn't been
corrupted. Example:
Hash: MP3/256/SHA1(3da3f0afc0d772825c43e310fe34eacf0dea204b)
- Message of the day: A general message that the artist wants to
associate with this song. Can be anything from a simple hello, a
description of the song, a request for help, an advertisement, or
anything. This could appear on the face of an MP3 player, or in a
bubble on your desktop, or however the player feels fit to show it.
Example:
MoTD: Only 1 copy left of my limited edition vinyl album, $50!
MoTD: Don't forget, I'm playing the Fillmore tonight at 8pm!
- Lyrics: The lyrics of the song itself could be easily included in the
song, or perhaps a URL where the lyrics can be downloaded.
- Other songs by this artist / recommended by this artist: Links to
other songs by this artist. A player could be configured to poll this
at some frequency to be automatically notified when new music by an
artist becomes available.
The important thing to take away is that metadata can contain anything,
and registrars merely record and host it -- it might or might not have
any awareness of what the various name/value pairs actually mean. You
needn't ask anybody's permission or get the approval of any standards
body to create new metadata: just add it to your song, and any player
that doesn't expect it will ignore it.
V. Artist Compensation via Player Integration
==============================================
The basis of this system is to enable fans who want to compensate
artists whenever and wherever the mood strikes them, in whatever
amount,
for whatever reason they come up with. This is enabled through
integration with the players themselves, as this reduces the latency
between hearing the song, making the decision to support the artist,
and
actually conducting the transaction.
The specific method of the integration is up to the designer of the
player or service. But some examples that could be applied to any
general MP3 player include a "thumb's up button" where $0.50 is sent to
the artist when pressed, or an "auto-compensate" option where $0.05 is
sent to the artist each time his song is played in entirety, etc. All
of this would be opt-in and configurable by the user in regards to the
amount being paid and the frequency of payment.
As for how the payment would be technically conducted, this would
depend
on the payment protocol and would likely be decided by a period of
competition ultimately leading to a few widely supported "de facto"
standards. For example, a phone-integrated player might use a payment
protocol that puts song contributions straight onto your phone bill.
An
iPod might keep an internal count of what payouts are left to be done,
and then upload the transactions to an iTunes-integrated micropayment
engine when synchronized. WinAMP might accumulate transactions until
they exceed some threshold where paying the artist directly via PayPal
makes sense. And so on. Payment providers will compete vigorously for
adoption by players and registrars alike, but the ultimate decision for
who to pay, how, and how much rests with the listener.
VI. Conclusion
===============
In summary, the above proposal outlines a global framework where fans
can voluntarily support fans through a competitive ecosystem of
compatible service providers. The design separates functionality along
clear layers of accountability and enables competition between multiple
parties within the layers. The goal is to create a flexible, powerful
system that enables a degree of innovation yet unseen in the music
industry (at least, in the legal music industry). Much like the web
and
internet itself have transitioned from small, non-profit research
projects into engines of global commerce, music -- both its creation
and
consumption -- has the capability to be a similarly innovative and
powerful force. It just needs a framework that encourages it.
VII. FAQ
========
Here are the questions I've heard asked on this list before, and some
quick answers to each:
1) What if nobody decides to pay?
The base assumption of the entire music industry is that music is
valuable, and that fans actually do exist. If fans -- people who value
art and wish to support their artists -- do not in fact exist, then
this
system won't create them.
2) What if no music players decide to support payment options?
The system works best if the payment protocols are implemented in the
players themselves. In the meantime, until these are widespread, music
registrars can offer web-based gateways that help fans support artists
using today's technology.
3) What's to prevent me from uploading the Beatles as my own mine?
The standard solution to this problem is to have a "sunrise period"
where prominent trademark and copyright owners are given early access
to
submit their own songs to the database. The expectation is each of the
labels would run its own "private" registrar to manage its songs, and
thus they would simply upload a complete list of fingerprints for all
their songs to the registrar-management agency. In the event anybody
uploads one of the label's songs to a different registrar, a flag would
be raised when the fingerprint conflicts with the existing database,
and
would be resolved through manual action.
4) So... where's the big pool of money? Where's the sampling?
That's right, this system doesn't need to globally sample listening
demographics in order to disperse a central pool of money according to
some arbitrary measure of value. Rather, the money is never pooled --
it goes straight from the fan to the artists (via one of many competing
payment gateways). The samples are never taken -- it's not really
practical in the first place, and it's just not needed. And no
arbitrary measure of value is selected -- it's left up to every fan to
decide how much to give his artists.
5) What about piracy?
What about it? It already happens today in vast amounts, and no plan
on
the books even claims to have a chance of doing anything about it.
Piracy *is* online music -- everything else is just an aberration.
This
plan seeks to capitalize on the real world as it exists today, tapping
into the vast sums of money that fans currently aren't giving to music
labels.
6) What about privacy?
This system gives exceptional privacy protections to all involved
because there is no one entity that sees all activity. As such, it
doesn't centrally aggregate sampling data, demographic profiling,
historical traffic, personally identifiable information, or any of the
problems that people are generally skittish about. The centermost
entity of this plan is an organization that just has anonymous
fingerprints of unnamed songs, and knows absolutely nothing about the
songs themselves, the artists who make them, the users who listen to
them, or the interactions in between.
7) X got paid $Y before, will he still be?
Possibly. Maybe he'll get paid more. Or maybe less. The same can be
said about every other solution on the table.
8) But it's not fair! How will X get paid for Y?
This plan recognizes that every fan has a different idea of what is or
is not fair, and fully empowers him to act upon that notion. Even the
old system that is rapidly dying wasn't "fair", it's merely "what was".
This plan does not attempt to blindly copy what was, nor invent some
new notion of "fair" and mandate that all fans obey it under threat of
force. So in this sense, it is arguably the most fair of all.
9) So that's all well and good, but seriously... Where's the sampling?
Seriously, it's not needed. Take it in reverse.
Q: Why sample?
A: Well, we know how to at least try to sample music fingerprints
transferred over the backbone, and we think that samples are somehow
related to how often songs are listened to, so by sampling we can get a
sense of which songs are most often listened to.
Q: Why do we care how often songs are listened to?
A: Well, we're assuming that the number of times a song is listened to
is representative of how valuable it is to fans.
Q: Why do we care if a song is valuable to fans?
A: Because artists must be paid in proportion to value, obviously!
Q: Paid by whom?
A: Well... by fans, I guess... obviously.
Q: Why don't fans pay artists directly?
A: Well they *were*, through CD sales, until piracy ruined everything.
Q: I thought CD sales largely didn't go to artists.
A: Well... if you want to get *technical*, no, but they sorta "trickled
down to artists"... It's complicated.
Q: Ok, again, why don't they pay artists directly?
A: Because that's impossible! What, are they supposed to track down
every artist in their playlist and give them a nickel each time they
play the song?
Q: Sure, why not?
A: Because... because you just can't. It's complicated. Fans can't be
trusted to support their artists directly. They need help.
Q: Help from whom?
A: Well, help from me, of course. And my friends. Only we can get
artists compensated.
Q: But I thought your CD sales largely didn't go to artists?
A: Yes they do! They trickle!
Q: So let me get this straight: the goal is to help artists get paid by
fans in proportion to how much fans like them. But fans can't be
trusted to do it directly, and instead artists need the help of
organizations that historically take the lion's share of the profit and
leave a trickle for the artists themselves? And the best way to do
this
is to force everyone to pay you a bunch of money that you distribute
based on relative estimated value to fans calculated by sampling
backbone traffic for a small set of music fingerprints, extrapolating
global traffic, inferring total music listens from that, and then
converting that sampled/extrapolated/inferred number into "value to
fans" with an arbitrary formula selected by... by whom again?
A: By me.
Q: Got it.
A: That's right! Now you're getting it.
Q: And why not just let fans give artists money directly?
A: You just... you just can't! And... it's different, and therefore
scary. Artists talking to fans? Fans talking to artists? What an
absurd thought. Fans can't be trusted! Artists don't want to talk to
fans! There need to be a middleman. Lots and lots of middlemen. And
formulas! And sampling! And most importantly -- a huge, enormous pool
of money. That I control. Trust the trickle. It worked for your
grandpa. Why can't it work for you?
--------
So that's my plan. What do you think?
|
