Various things keep coming to mind about which I never got to write because they weren’t related to Portland politics. One of them just occurred to me as I was standing outside on the front steps of my apartment building as two police officers approached to respond (without much haste, so presumably nothing urgent) to something or someone in some other unit.
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with what occurred to me. It’s just that, for whatever reason, that was what was happening around me when the thought struck.
A couple of months back, I ran across a post by Kristin Hersh about file sharing in which she makes this statement: “There is no such thing as a music pirate in my world.”
(More recently, she announced their new EP would be given away “in the hope of freeing music” — a comment whose self-important hyperbole I’m fairly confident is both perfectly earnest and self-mocking at the same time.)
It’s one of the best statements I’ve read from a musician in defense of file sharing, and worth reading for its own sake. But it brought to mind something I pondered some time back, when I was both paying more attention to local music and (happenstantially) had purchased the mp3s of the first 50FootWave album directly from the band’s website.
I still think there’s a micropayment-based tipjar-like solution to helping small and independent musicians bring more money directly to them, especially musicians who don’t fear file sharing.
One of the problems with tipjar-like micropayments is that most people are not going to want to pull out their credit card or PayPal information in order to toss a musician a dollar or two. What I don’t understand is why no one (preferably a collective or cooperative of musicians themselves) has offered what seems to be the obvious solution.
Wouldn’t part of the micropayment problem be overcome by establishing a site or service which offers what could be termed a micropayment shopping cart?
Rather than have to make dozens of individual micropayments to individual musicians or bands, this service would simply place each micropayment into the cart. When that cart reached a certain interval — be it time-based (such as weekly or monthly) or amount-based (such as $25 or $100), the service would send email to the owner of the cart reminding them it was time to make their bulk payment.
So the end user would drop small payment amounts into the cart, but then pay them all off at once, in a single larger actual payment, which the service would then distribute to each musician accordingly.
One trick, of course, would be to integrate this shopping cart functionality into file sharing software, either directly or through the use of plugins. Download some music and discover you really appreciate the musician responsible? Click the built-in or plugged-in shopping cart icon in your file sharing software, it runs a check to see if the artist participates in the program, and if so, add a payment to your cart for future payment when it reaches the threshold you’ve specified.
Even without built-in or plugged-in functionality when it comes to the file sharing software itself, the user could always simply go directly to the micropayment shopping cart site and take care of the process there.
There doesn’t seem to be any particular technological hurdle to overcome to make something like this work, although like with all such things there likely would be cultural and motivational ones.
But as a general concept, it would seem to make some sense. Has it been tried? If so, it presumably failed or stagnated — but would that have been because the idea isn’t sound or because it was poorly executed?
Why should smaller or independent artists be relegated to hoping they are integrated into larger corporate approaches such as iTunes? Isn’t there a way to open up voluntary patronage of musicians by listeners in a more direct but collective fashion?