For the first half of the twentieth century, commercial radio in the US was essentially illegal, and stations were subjected to the same kind of copyright lawsuits that P2P users are experiencing today. It was only after songwriters banded together to form The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) that radio stations went legit. In return for a fee the radio stations gained the right to play whatever music they liked.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an idea called Voluntary Collective Licensing which would apply a similar logic to digital music. The idea is that the music industry forms several “collecting societies” which offer file-sharing music fans the opportunity to “get legit” in exchange for a reasonable regular payment (something like $5 - $10 a month). The money collected would be divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.

I think this is a good idea. It differs from a subscription model in that it allows users to choose the service that they want to use, and it also allows for user generated music libraries such as the ill-fated Oink to operate legally. The license fee could easily be rolled into consumer products such as broadband internet or mobile data packages (unlimited digital music sharing for an extra £5 a month!), and P2P users already do a much better job of publishing, cataloguing and documenting music than the music industry themselves.

You can read the full article over at Electronic Frontier Foundation where they have neatly set out their case and attempted to provide answers to many of the inevitable questions that arise.

I'm not going to talk about this at length as Paul Glazowski has already done the job at Mashable, but I would like to express my concern at the recent trend in bands and artists creating their own social networks. The most high profile of these have been Radiohead's W.A.S.T.E. Central and 50 Cent’s thisis50.com.

I'm all in favour of bands creating and nurturing communities around their official sites – this has been happening for years with artist forums, and has grown to include commenting and user generated content such as photos and fan remixes.

It's possible that if OpenSocial takes off then this kind of fragmentation of the social web will be easier to manage – but until then it makes sense to engage with your fan base on the existing (and hugely popular) social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. We only just got everyone together in one place – why leave so soon?

I had intended to write a post about interactive music videos – but guess what? There are hardly any. In fact I managed to find around five, of which “Black Mirror” by Arcade Fire was the clear winner. This and Rektor's Princess (2003) were the only ones which kept me engaged throughout the length of the track. Arcade Fire's other contribution to the world's smallest genre had a certain charm but ultimately became very dull very fast.

While searching through a thread of comments on Digg I found this quote from a user called “bitcloud”:

“I'm pretty sure there's a reason the rift between interactive and passive media exists - too passive to be interesting, and too active to be passive...”

Is this true or have we just not cracked the interactive music promo yet?