Music For All! (And Profits Too)

A Canadian professor has an idea he thinks would breathe new life into the music business. He “proposes putting all recorded music on a robust search engine — Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work — and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song. In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers — two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven’t had to compensate artists. The assumption is that if songs cost only 5 cents, people would download exponentially more music. The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, Pearlman.”