Complement - Re: [A2k] Iceland to become a model for freedom of communication

[Federico Heinz]

On 18/02/2010, Philippe Aigrain (perso) wrote:
> If I may try to reconcile your apparently contradictory statements:

I'm sorry, I'm not convinced yet.

> - However, it is also true that this increased attention does not
> materialise in most cases in sufficient income.

What "sufficient" income for any individual artist is, and whether all (or even
most!) of them get it is not something we should be worrying about in
particular. Plenty of jobs out there don't materialize in sufficient income,
and this general problem does deserve our attention, but I don't see why we
should single artists out as having a priority in this respect.

> The reason for it is simply that the people who control the income channels
> [...] have no interest in creating diversity in revenues. Even today, the
> profit per album of a CD published the majors has never stopped increasing,
> but that's at the cost of ever more concentrated promotion.

This argument does nothing but support my argument. These are the people that
are being hit worst by online sharing, yet they still are making good money,
which they use for their campaigns to prevent change in the cultural landscape.
Why should we subsidize them?

> The collective management societies are controlled by an alliance of heirs
> of rights, a few established artists and some special interest groups.
> Concentration in concerts is a hugely problematic competition problem.

Which is exactly the problem with a mutualized funding for the reward to
artists: such a scheme would either be run by collective management
associations, or in the best case by some new collective organization which,
even if it were purity itself when it was born, would take no time flat in
becoming just as corrupt, simply by the fact that they will be dealing with
large amounts of other people's money, and hence power.

As an author, this mutualized funding is a problem for me: the collecting
agency's taking money from my public, and then distributing it according to
some to-be-determined mechanism, means that I will have a harder time
convincing my public to spend money on me, specifically: they now have less
money to spend, and why should they give money to me when they already have
paid for "me as a public service"?

	Fede