The Royalty Question, Part I

THere's a thoughtful article in today's New York Times about the value of free contributors to the whole web 2.0 schema. This piece was written by Billy Bragg, a veteran songwriter/performer, but it could easily apply to other sites other than music sharing ones:

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

What’s at stake here is more than just the morality of the market. The huge social networking sites that seek to use music as free content are as much to blame for the malaise currently affecting the industry as the music lover who downloads songs for free. Both the corporations and the kids, it seems, want the use of our music without having to pay for it.

As a former musician, I've wondered from the get go how newcomers are supposed to earn any kind of compensation from this new market paradigm. This is a hot topic these days, so I'll do a few posts (promise!) on this in the coming days...