Pay for free lunch

The real product has shifted down the chain. Musicians still make money. They sell concerts and make commercial appearances. Singing one song may bring some of them revenues in the six figures. Emerging stars upload their new songs onto the Net in the hope of finding a wide audience. It is the record labels that are suffering. People who are not holding onto the old revenue model left long ago. Who'd want to be in a business of making sales brochures while being excluded from the business with commercial value?

Right now, the attention is on the fee-collecting process. Apple with its iTunes store has given hope to many. Of course, convenience and security of payment are important. So is reasonable pricing. The real difficulty is in the culture - habits nurtured through decades and accepted by a billion-plus people.

China has a musicians' association that collects royalties. The song Legend, one of the most popular in recent years, earned a total of 94.75 yuan in a year from the nation's karaoke segment. (And it's much easier to find a karaoke store in China than a public toilet.)

Liu Huan, the reigning king of pop music on the mainland, gets a royalty check that does not even meet the minimum wage of the capital city. That is equivalent to Michael Jackson earning $500 from his songs each month, and Thriller bringing him a whopping 100 bucks in a year. Sorry, I can't help being sarcastic.

I'm sure some users will gladly pay to download songs. The trick is, how much of the online population will change their habits to embrace this, and equally important, how much of that revenue will be funneled back to the recording industry, or what remains of it?

To restore commercial value to music in the digital form, piracy must be eradicated. One is organized piracy, which the government is obligated to aggressively prosecute - more aggressively than what's been done so far. The other is harder to root out because it is done on an individual basis and in the spirit of sharing. I can imagine the elimination of music sharing on portal sites, but how can you prevent it from popping up on private online groups?

Only when fighting piracy gets serious will alternative revenue models, such as monthly subscription, become genuinely feasible. Until then, Gao Xiaosong should probably keep up his gigs on TV shows.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn.

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