Consider this, with apologies to Jonathan Swift, a modest proposal. Or call it – apologies to Charles Dickens – a tale of two cities.
We begin in 2000 as Napster, a service that allowed music lovers to receive music without paying – i.e., to steal it – is meeting its Waterloo. Sued into submission by the music industry, it has agreed to start charging users a subscription fee and to cut the industry a slice of the money pie, paving the way for pay services like iTunes and Spotify.
In 2020, we take for granted that this is how we get our music, but in 2000, those who had grown used to music being as free as sunshine and rain were apoplectic. “Music,” one of them wrote, “is not something which should be copyrighted and sold and still owned by the musician.”
If that plaint sounds painfully naive to you, be advised that a similar sentiment stalks the business of newspaper journalism. I’m thinking of the folks who hit me up on Twitter each week, morally affronted at the idea of – gasp! -paying for journalism. I actually empathize. Paywalls are annoying and household budgets, limited – especially now. But see, I also empathize with journalists, who, like musicians, have car notes to pay and children to feed.
Interestingly, some in the newspaper business are working to adopt the music business model, to give readers a way to pay a once-monthly fee and have access to all the papers. So far, none of the nascent services has managed to revolutionize the delivery of news the way iTunes did for music.