More on Music

Right here is what everyone really wants from the music industry. You buy a license directly from online distributors. You get the original uncompressed music tracks directly from the studios in the highest fidelity available. The music is separated into tracks so that you can remix it yourself. This is way superior to any particular version of a song people could find online. You could tweek the sound of a particular instrument or voice. The dynamic range of the music fidelity isn't clipped off like it normally would have been in a final studio mix (which studios do so the music sounds louder when they play it on the radio). Text information about the song is all included in the file. The vocal track come with cues to generate a karaoke version of the song from lyrics also included elsewhere in the file. And finally it includes final mixing profiles for the versions of the songs we hear on the radio as other non bleeped out versions of the songs we would normally would find on CD's. If new mixes of a song come out you have a right to the mix and new sound track data.

As far as the license, it's an indefinite right to one copy of every rendition of that song. The licenses are electronic which you should be able to make printable receipts from for accounting purposes. You could delete all the data files and then go online and then redownload everything minus probably a minor service charge. But most importantly individual song licenses are tradable. Once you own a song, you own it, the producers can't come out with an enhanced version later to entice you to shell out even more money. If you change your mind about a song someone else could buy that one song from you unlike iTunes where you have to hand over the whole account. Songs would then become like stocks where they fluctuate in price. When the price of the songs fall too low such as six months after a song is initially released when people get tired of it, then the music producers themselves would buy back the licenses; kind of like the schools buying back your textbooks at the end of term in college. I can imagine paying as much as $10 just for a just released song. Later the music industry would probably buy it back once the priced dropped below $2, but still that is like an $8 profit on one song. This makes online licenses practical for music collectors and in fact I'd imagine the price of most of the good music to hover around $6 per song as no one will really want to give it up from their lifetime collection. How much would it be worth when you old and retired to listen to all the songs of your youth long after their popularity had faded. If the music industry did everything I described here their profits would blow up a hundred fold.

Too bad it won't ever happen.