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Forget about paying for bulky and sometimes fragile plastic disks. Forget about paying for downloads that won't play on anything but devices loaded with heavy DRM software. Forget about paying on a per-track or per-album basis.

Yes, I reckon the best model the music industry can hope for is a flat-rate, all you can eat, subscription model.

Let's face it, this model works just fine for a wide range of other services that involve the publication or access to intellectual property stored or delivered in an electronic/digital format.

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Do you subscribe to Sky TV? Most Kiwi households do -- and they seem more than happy to pay a flat-rate fee, regardless of how many hours they watch of their chosen channels. Likewise, Sky seems to make a damned fine profit out of those subscriptions.

Want to access the internet? Chances are very good that you're on a flat-rate access plan that (on dial-up) gives you unlimited hours and (on DSL) gives you "almost" unlimited data.

Yes, flat-rate subscriptions are a wonderful idea because they minimize the amount of administrative and accounting work required to bill customers while providing those customers with an easy-to-budget price.

So here's the plan, which I admit is not new but which is looking more attractive every day:

The music labels put their entire catalogs online and available for download free of charge (gasp!).

However, these downloads are encumbered with strong DRM -- which means that they're useless to anyone who doesn't have the right hardware/software/key combination.

In order to actually use those downloads, customers will have to subscribe to the service, which will give them a play-key that effectively allows all those otherwise useless files to be heard.

The labels could then license the necessary firmware to makers of portable media players (just like Microsoft licenses WMA code) so that you don't have to use a PC to listen to your downloads.

Right now you might be thinking that this is an awful idea because it means that you'll no longer be able to buy music. Well guess what -- you've never been able to buy music.

Those CDs in your collection... you don't own the music on them, just the plastic they come on -- so this is nothing new.

The *great* thing about this from the music publisher's perspective is that they get an ongoing revenue stream -- even if they don't release any new albums. If the public want to keep listening to the tracks they've downloaded then they have to keep paying the monthly subscription (just like Sky TV and your ISP service).

The benefit to customers is that they can download and listen to as much music as their little hard-drives and weary ears will handle -- all for the one small monthly fee. Woo hoo!

Of course one might think that it's the artists who will suffer under such a system -- after all, there's only a fixed amount of monthly revenue to be shared amongst a growing number of performers.

Well, given that there would now be greatly reduced distribution costs, no retail margins to subtract, and a greater awareness of their music (thus promising to make concert revenues higher), I don't think they should suffer that much at all. Other ways around this problem are to structure the subscription service so that there are various categories with separate subscriptions. eg: "New Releases" for tracks released in the past 3 months.

The other sad fact of life might be that recording artists may end up getting paid a fair and reasonable wage for their efforts -- just like the rest of us.

But what about piracy? What about those folks who'll simply hook the headphone jack of their media player up to a PC and produce MP3 copies without any DRM then sell or make those files available for download?

Well get over it. This already happens and always will -- just as it is possible to view Sky TV's UHF service for free through a simple software download. But, just as this hasn't really hurt Sky's profits, I don't think piracy will stop the recording labels from making a profit either - providing their pricing is fair and reasonable in the first place.

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