A few ... relatively uninformed ... thoughts about 
the entire controversy related to napster. 
Joe Jaszkowiak
02/14/2001

IMHO (which is very limited in knowledge and thought)
the industry going forward should work like this:

1) Musicians treat their music as shareware. If people
like the music, they should then opt to pay for it via
paypal or a similar method. The musician should set the
price (this will from now on be refered to as
musicshare).

2) An impartial third party (I personally would prefer
one of the search engine providers) takes care of 
electronic distribution of music
(central access point with links to remote
repositories). This can (and should) be very similar to
napster. Artists can then *register*, and enter their
works into the distribution database. Only the
registered artist can make repository entries for their
music. The main page for this repository contains four
things. 1:a search engine 2: list of most recently
uploaded music 3: list of most downloaded music 4:
between one and four paid ad banners for musicians that
link to a search on that musician's work (one banner per
artist) (these are rotated ... using ad-FU or similar).
There should also be a way to pay musicshare on the
central site.

3) Kiosks located at record stores that allow for a user
to download music and create a cd at a cost. The cost is
governed by musicshare*1.2 plus a reasonable production
and maintanence cost that is set by the record store. If
the artist is independant, the entire musicshare*1.2
goes to the artist. If the artist is signed with a
record company, musicshare*1 goes to the musician, and
musicshare *.2 goes to the record company.

4) Record companies change their role to that of
management of the artists. An artist would pay a record
company for the following services (cost is governed by
the level of services): 1. data repository services,
artist registration onto central site, publication of
songs on central site, and collection of musicshare. 2.
All standard artist management and promotion tasks that
are done today (tours etc).  3. Pressing, production and
distribution of CDs (for record stores) 


Just my 2cents (adjusted to $10 for inflation).
-Joe 

See Also:
http://www.discover.com/feb_01/featnapster.html