Warner Music-Marketing Experiment Rebuts Critics

3 Minute Ad Age: March 2, 2009

Produced by Hoag Levins
Published: March 02, 2009

Choruss president Jim Griffin wants ISPs to collect music royalties from everyone.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Is Warner Music Group's new music marketing experiment actually a new kind of tax that would have to be paid by all Internet users? That's just one of the contentious points of debate flying around the new efforts of the Warner-backed company called Choruss. The year-old non-profit wants university networks and the country's ISPs to collect a music licensing fee from all their customers. Choruss president Jim Griffin jabbed back at critics at last week's Digital Music Forum East in New York.

2 Comments

By A. | WASHINGTON D.C, DC March 2, 2009 11:38:48 am:

If Time Warner wants to charge ISPs and campuses a license fee (which will be passed down to the internet users), then it is only fair to let internet users be free to trade music on the net.

Paying three times for a song/album (cost of download/CD, plus any state sales tax, plus THIS LICENSE FEE) will only be fair if the internet unsers are free to use the music they downloaded to do whatever they want; i.e: so-called Illegal downloading and uploading will now be LEGAL.

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By paynetaylor | ANDOVER, MA March 2, 2009 01:34:43 pm:

A learning experiment? Actuarial monetization ideas?

Who are we kidding? A fee (read tax)by any other name is still a tax, folks, no matter how absurdly you may try to dress it up.

Breakthroughs against the delta of loss music is suffering coming from business deals?

Sounds like the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority which was scheduled to be disbanded years ago, instead substantially increasing commuter tolls.

This is no opera; there is no deux ex machina?

Oh, yes, it is, and the God Machine coming down from the record industry heavens is Choruss itself. Only this time, it's not to save the day, but to sink it.

Hey, we all know music is in the crapper and has been for some time. Sales are down and cries of "piracy" as the lamest of the lame reasons for that are up. Quelle surprise!

Unfortunately, the more insidious ramafication of that errant notion is that rather than merely blame consumers, the object of the game has now shifted to taxing them. Oh, gee, didn't see that one coming, did we?

Bottom line: the digital revolution has taught us two things. 1) Freedom of access is paramount to progress. 2) No "tax" ever goes away (we kind of already knew that, but it's always worth mentioning again for the terminally forgetful).

As the music industry knows, while taxes never go, consumers do. So, irrespective of its dismal performance, any "governmental muscle" (read tax-levying entity like Choruss) brought in to remedy the situation should keep its hands where we can see them -- out of the consumer's pocket.

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