As it has been explained to me in theory (not by Virgin, but by someone else involved in this technology who seems to know what they are talking about) the psuedo tethered on demand downloads (i.e. pick any songs you want for your portable played for the length of your subscription) the units will monitor the number of plays for each track. All this info will be compiled for all services (music net, rhapsody, napster etc..) and placed into a big pool to be paid from the overall fund. That fund will come from all the subcription fees. I have no idea the dollars, but it seems that you'll have to have someone representing you (perhaps CDBaby will be that entity for indie artists, though I am not sure about that yet) and they would make sure that the portion their artists got plays were paid fairly and then distributed.

I will say that 8.5 cents per track per listen is not a viable model. If you listened to 3 songs a day for a month, that would be more than what the average subscription service is charging (8-10 dollars). So it has to be a different fee. Just imagine if terrestrial radio had to pay that amount? We'd be talking (if I am doing the math right) $85,000 per song per million listeners... if you had 2 million listeners and you played 12 songs an hour 24/7, that would be 48 million dollars a day in fees. It's absurd. So why put that type of burden on a subscription service, especially when not even a microfraction of that financial payment is made by current radio.

Brian

Brian Austin Whitney
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