Jim Griffin consults for Warner, one of the four major music labels, and he sees a disturbing sight when he looks around at the digital music landscape. Taking music without paying for it may not be "morally voluntary," Griffin says, but he admits it has become "functionally voluntary." No civilized society, he adds, can endure "purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture." So Griffin's job is to help Warner monetize digital music, and he's convinced that the issue of payment for music is nothing less than "our generation's nuclear power." If our society can monetize music in a balanced, consumer-friendly way, the results will be awesome.
Speaking today at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen conference, Griffin made an impassioned case for music and the importance of monetizing it. He started from the premise, of course, that those who create art should be able to profit from their creative work.
Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license; essentially, bringing the collection society model to end users. In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme.
While quick to stress that he isn't in favor of a compulsory (i.e., government-mandated) blanket license, Griffin is convinced that a blanket license is the way to make it almost frictionless for consumers to access a huge collection of music. How this would work in practice still remains unclear—would users be allowed to keep the music they download after they stop paying a fee? What about bands and labels that don't sign on? etc.—and some versions of the idea start to sound a lot like existing subscription services.