Investor contributions have tapered off, and maybe it's the weekend traffic slump effect, hangovers from all you celebrating Dia de los Muertos, or maybe the more likely, that I'm just not articulating the honey in this pot.

At the root of this plan to unseat the RIAA control is this frightening concept of the free track, the quick-and-dirty Sun-Records style single recording, done cheaply as possible, as often as possible, and using this as the token of exchange by which new music artists become widely known and recognized. The success of this plan rests 100% on acceptance of this new music format in the same way that acceptance of the 3-minute track was the entry price to get in on the post-war radio boom.

How Free is "Free"

The idea is to reduce the production cost to subvert the RIAA argument that pop music creation costs must be recouped by CD sales, and by extension how bootlegging cuts the artist at their production cost funding level. Here's where the studios must play an innovative part, to take all this new-generation of recording/mixing equipment and instead of reaching ever higher into digital manipulations, to expand their repetoire to recreating the old one-shot live capture of the living sound.

Bands are, of course, still free to look at the recording process as sculture, as a concerted effort to produce a Glenn Gould perfect storm -- that need will remain, but let's be honest: How many of the CDs currently on the shelves of your average HMV shop fit that description? 10%? 5%? 1%? And that's just for the artists who have made the grade into RIAA mainstream distribution channels.

When the recording itself is simple, direct to bits and produced for affordable fees, the argument of recouping production costs vanishes, more than amply compensated by the increased gigs and increased ticket prices as a result of driving up demand for venue seats.

But what about intellectual property? Do I advocate all these singles be free as in free-software free, free for everyone to use as they wish? Straight answer: No.

The Medium is the Message

For the purposes of these promotional singles, I am advocating a sub-genre of the Creative Commons licensing, or more exactly a variation of the popular dual licensing seen in many software products. In a nutshell, the track itself, the recording is free, but the song is not free.

The licensing which seems most apropos would allow anyone to download, rip, burn trade or re-sell the recording -- the record is what we trade, the intellectual property of the song remains with the artists, subject to the most of the same old rules of play. If you have a commercial radio station, you can get your hands on these recordings for free, but you would list them in your station playlists as always, and your station licensing would include this report back to SOCAN/BMI or or whatever your local performing rights agent might be, and the band would be entitled to royalties for it. Ditto for use by television or any of the other SMTE agencies. The broadcast issue probably gets fuzzy since you can list the songs on your website for free, and maybe SOCAN can cut us a deal here for just these tracks, but the radio stations already pay these rights, all we are really doing here is broadening the catalog for them by side-stepping the usual means for getting the tracks in their hands.

Similarly, while you have the track and can give out copies to everyone on your Christmas list or sell compilations to your neighbours, if you found a song that you wanted to perform and re-record on your own, you are going to need to acquire performance rights to that song. Here again, fuzziness arises because you probably want to release this song as one of your free tracks, and for this purpose, unless the recording rights to the song is minor, you won't be able to afford to part with the tracks for free (even though most bands already do).

An Era of Co-operation

What the intellectual property rights issue underlines is a widening of the stakeholders who must come into an agreement to make this new distribution paradigm workable. We need special designations for free distributions where we can protect the authors of the truly great songs without strangling the process. The payment of any sorts of royalties will, of course, prompt artists towards only releasing original material, much as the current rights rules penalize artists who play traditional or cover material (Coltrane got squat for "My Favourite Things") so in that way, it's not much different from the status quo, but it would be nice to think that, for the benefit of the member artists, these organizations could get behind the process and update their categorizations to benefit from this new digital reality.

Will the rights orgs listen? It's as Bowie said, you can cling to the old models all you want, the new way is here, it's really here now anyway so we might as well learn to live with it.

Free Trade

What is essential, what will make it all work, is if we have an atmosphere of free trade, free of any litigation fears for simply spreading the word that some artist is worth a listen. I'd love to see a new generation of MP3 devices with that Palm-Pilot infra-red feature where you could meet friends at a bar or blog-cafe and beam them a track you think they'd enjoy.