P2P "Licensing" Gaining Traction and More Details

What began as an SXSW Panel Discussion turned into a genuine label-backed initiative to obtain funds from P2P music downloads (legal or otherwise) for artist and labels. However, the fee assessement mechanism seems to be evolving from the original panel discussion that was characterized as an end-user opt-in to a blanket license structure (think SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI models).

Frank Rose elaborates more on the model in a recent Wired online article. Spending a significant amount of my time researching the payment and licensing models for online music and it's various forms of consumption, the most intriguing aspect is the payment and rev-split debate that will quickly follow:

"This raises big questions for artists. Still to be determined, for example, is whether a download should be treated as a purchase, in which case the artists would get at most 10 percent of the proceeds, or as an audio stream, in which case they would get closer to 50 percent.
"That's a huge row that's coming up," says Peter Jenner, a longtime Griffin colleague who manages Billy Bragg and heads the International Music Managers Forum. "If we don't get our shit together soon, we'll get screwed by the record companies. I think everyone should stop whining and get on with making sure we don't get shafted like we did on the old business model.""

It would be interesting to see how the financial breakdowns for this P2P model compares to the math for on-demand streaming like Last.fm and advertising-sponsored downloads like Spiralfrog. While all are different flavors of online music consumption, I'm still in the camp that in the future the end-user won't really care about the method, just that it's on-demand in one form or another.