Would You Pay $20 a Month for Unlimited DRM-Free Music?

As the anti-DRM brigade rolls on, more and more creative ideas continue to emerge about how to keep the record industry afloat without further angering consumers who're tired of restrictions on how they consume their music. Radiohead's "pay what you want" experiment has the makings of a huge success (some are saying $10 million in sales so far). In Europe, things are getting even stranger. Specifically, Denmark's equivalent of the RIAA, the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers, has reportedly floated an idea (at least abstractly) to allow users to have unrestricted downloads of all the music they want over peer-to-peer networks, in exchange for a flat fee of about 100 Danish kroner, or about US$19.

The catch is that the fee, at least in the IFPI's version of it, wouldn't be optional. Rather, all Internet service subscribers would have the fee tacked on to their bills. It'd be a great deal for mega-downloaders, but casual listeners, or those who don't consume their music online at all, would get the short end of the stick on this one. $19 seems awfully excessive to me. I'd be willing to accept a media "tax" of, say, $5 added to my bill... maybe a little more if the price included video/movies, too.

O'Reilly's Andy Oram notes that there are myriad problems with pricing per ISP connection, namely that many households share one ISP connection, or have none of their own. Would businesses have to pay the media tax? What if you pay by the hour at Starbucks? Would you be billed on a prorated basis? 

Still, it's an interesting idea and one that I hope promotes more discussion on how to remove onerous technological restrictions on music while fairly compensating those who create it.

LINK: Music industry association recommends flat-rate file sharing