I can't see the process is any more complex than at present.
Traditional royalty schemes reflected mechanical reproduction and
distribution costs which don't apply in an online age. As an example,
CD's represent a median point between high compression and hi-fidelity
for a given technological limit to data density on the surface of the
platter. Under current methods, I think we could see the entire beatles
corpus on one disk. If we excluded the royalty component, and allowed
for a normal return on r&d investment, we'd still have costs of
production down below $1 per CD.
So like Tommy Lee Jones says in M.I.B. do I have to go and buy the
white album again for $40?
I straddle the fence on this issue. I respect an artists desire to make
money, but as a consumer, I don't want to pay an inflated price. Either
we have patronage (which is in effect what I'm proposing) or we have
subsidy, or we have the current mess of unbalanced returns and
copyright piracy.
What really worries me is that the book trade is coping very badly with
the adjusments. I hear horrendous things about changes to the tax and
accountancy processes in the USA which make it cheaper to PULP unsold
works than to discount them for sale. More books are published, less
can make a profit... more amalgamations of publishing houses into a
small cartel of worldwide agencies. I'd say that while jacket detailing
and the colophon may be more attractive these days, the actual book
itself is printed on shit paper, with bad glueing, in crap typefaces.
One paperpack I rather fancied (a new review of the Battle of
Trafalgar, pimlico-like production, about the size of a thin king
penguin) was THIRTY-FOUR DOLLARS!! $34 used to be the price of an
*expensive* hardback inside the last 5 years.
I say the rot set in when Penguin books stopped doing pelican, and when
Dylan and Beatle Bootlegs went official.
So how about a formal return to patronage and artistic creation by
subscription? I'll give Sheena Easton and U2 $5 each NOT to make another
album, if I can also give Martin Simpson and Devo $5 towards their next ones...
I like the idea of online (self) publishing. The Artist can release a low
bandwidth version for free, and sell the high-quality feed via retail
outlets with CD-R cutting engines and a decoder. Cut out the middleman
and pay the local independant outlet AND the artist directly. If we could
find something a bit better than the wild-and-woolley Xerox-publishing method
I'd do the same for books any day.
-George