I think it'd be an interesting thing if music players had a way of kicking micropayments to the artists in question, especially considering how pliable I am (and probably other music fans are) during something like the guitar solo in Pink Floyd's "Time." Or pick whatever moves you.

On portable players, which will probably at some point all be connected to the Internet somehow, these micropayments could be queued, to dump when next plugged into a networked computer. Desktop players could do it directly. Each could potentially draw out of a Paypal account. You could imagine a button on the players specifically for this purpose. A "love" button.

What's interesting to me about this is it would link the music and the musician directly to the fan through the musical experience itself, while cutting out the increasingly unncessary industry entirely. I don't know of many music fans who are opposed to paying artists - it's paying the cigar chompers that they tend to object to.

As "piracy" of electronic data cannot be controlled whatever anyone thinks of the morality of it, I also like the bounty idea, which I've brought up in other places. An artist records an album and holds it up until an account is filled with a pre-determined amount of his choosing, say $250,000, at which time the music is released, universally. This would allow hardcore fans to pull campaigns together to compensate artists while unleashing *their* favorite music upon the world as a kind of gift. Artists could determine exactly how much they needed to make in advance. If fans of things will camp out for tickets days in advance, you could even picture them holding bake sales to raise ransom money for new albums.

It would encourage artists to make use of pre-existing social media like facebook and even (double shudder) myspace, mailing lists, and so on, and stay connected to fans. It would further alleviate the stress of seeing ones works spread across the Internet, because that would be the expected result once the bounty was paid. It would contribute to a massive worldwide cultural database. It would involve fans in promoting and being a giant online "street team" for music they love.

Music fans would become patrons of their favorite artists. The two ideas above in combination would allow a bulk sum to be paid on delivery, plus "residuals" as people are all enraptured at 3am dancing around spastically to "Transmission" who want to kick the surviving members of Joy Division a little love.

There are of course issues with this which would need to be worked out. It would probably involve most artists going independent (though I can see some kind of artistic co-operative, or co-operatives forming to make promotion and online distribution - that is to say hosting mp3 - no, flac or something like it - files online - easy to do).