OK, so what was the idea I was talking about:
First, we all agree that ultimately piracy isn't a good thing. And we also agree that the big label model that has been dictating the rules isn't a good thing either. Fortunately, it will be a history at some point in the not so distant future, because of piracy and music being easiliy available all over the net long before it's released.
Now imagine the following situation - I download an album, I listen quickly through it, and I never open the files again. Even more drastic example - I download something and I never even listen to it once. Am I guilty in piracy? Technically yes, but in reality no, because I would have never bought that album and I haven't done any harm to the artist by downloading his album. I have also not shared it, of course, but you don't do these things through P2P anymore anyway, there are file hosting services for that.
This gives me the following idea - if downloading is here to stay, and we have a problem with too much bullshit music being released, and we also have high bandwidth internet now (I listen to a lot of music on youtube, simply because I'm too lazy to look for the CD), we can do the following:
We stop releasing any music on portable drives or downloadable files (and we forget about DRM too). Then everybody who wants to listen to music gets a device that allows him to listen to whatever music he wishes from an archive that contains everything new being recorded. He can't record it, but he can listen to everything he wants, however many times he wants.
The artists will get paid on the basis of how many times each song thye made has been played, the first play per listener, however, will be free for each song. In the end of the year everybody gets charged some sane amount of money as a "music tax" on the basis of how much music he listened to. (and "music" will be quantified as the total time, not the number of tracks one has listened to to prevent artists from consciously making short tracks to make more money)
This way any crappy music that you listen to only once just to find out it sucks will be filtered out and the artists will not get paid for it. Which in turn will lead to the so much dreamed for separation of the real from the fake and the talented artists from the not so talented ones. It will also hopefully bring the creativity back into the music, for obvious reasons.
Of course, this can not be applied to already released music, but for everything after the system starts, it will work pretty well. And of course, it will never happen in the world we live in but I think it is still an interesting idea
