The issue, as outlined in the article, is that artists get different rates for whether a song was "sold" or "licensed" (with licensing giving a much higher percentage to the artist), and while services presented their sales as license agreements to the end customer, they presented them as sales to the artists, allowing the streaming service to restrict user rights while also not paying artists the much higher percentage.

There are of course different ways to interpret what a sale of a digital good is (as you note), but legally speaking with regard to the status quo, it seems like something large might be changing. Either end users might find they have a lot more rights (the ones they've traditionally had for purchased items), or artists will get a lot more money because they've been getting screwed for decades for licensed works, or possibly we'll see new legislation codifying the current status quo to protect the large media companies (because for some reason legislators often seem to think past ability to make money is a reason in itself to protect the method in which it was done, regardless of legality).

I think it's important to note that streaming services mostly take a fixed fee. This dispute was between the artist and the label. The difference in royalties was part of the record deal and Four Tet reached a settlement with this former record label.

And then, along came the blockchain and NFTs... one receipt per purchase??

This obviously doesn't help the streaming services, but, this - or something similar would help solve the quantum entanglement of digital music.

While I understand that NFTs could be used as a receipt for a digital purchase - the NFT system would have to scale impossibly well to keep track of the infinite copies of infinite digital goods multiplied by the billions of people.

Blockchain might be amazeballs but it doesn't seem to scale THAT well.

This metaphor is really not appropriate. We are really just talking about the definitions for 'Sale' and 'License' in a contract which we haven't been given access to read.

NFT's don't solve this, unless we are talking about making licenses transferrable, but the author seems pretty clear that any form of license isn't acceptable in their eyes.

It depends on whether you consider the difference in royalty rates to be just wordplay.

> It depends on whether you consider the difference in royalty rates to be just wordplay.

Royalty rates are a completely different issue to the text shown when you are purchasing - but wouldn't you expect different royalty rates for different types of product/media as an artist?

As in, if I sell a vinyl record of your new single for $10 with your photo on the front and plaster it all over the record shops (with high distribution and manufacture costs) that the fee might be different than what I pay you for a $0.99 MP3 download (lower price but zero incremental cost), and that the $0.99 download fee might be different to the fee that the artist would charge for a live broadcast (highly dependent on licence context)?

No, certainly not. It does seem wrong for one group to claim one thing, and then another group to claim a different thing, both of which serve their own financial ends and not the actual content creators.

Having said that, I was mostly talking about the difference between licensing and buying from a consumer's perspective. There are still a ton of restrictions which come with "owning" something, but those are just ignored by the author because those were laws passed by a legislature and not a license term by a private company.

From a consumer perspective, ownership comes with first sale rights (e.g. the right to resell) but a license doesn't. There has been little progress so far on "owning" purely digital copies of anything because copyright holders oppose it and many activists oppose the DRM that would be required to enforce reselling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

We don't need DRM to enforce reselling. Equipment and methods to reproduce physical media are widespread today and there isn't a way to prevent copying and then reselling. Other than the marginal cost of CDs, Vinyl, cassettes, etc.

Purely digital just drops that cost from a few cents to nothing. DRM free music stores have existed for over a decade and already de-facto operate in this manner.

There isn't a practical reason to require DRM in order to have ownership over a digital copy of a song.

>But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? It's not your job to prove you own something but their to prove you stole it.

> their [job] to prove you stole it.

That's a sound legal principle, but unfortunately it doesn't apply in all situations and in all jurisdictions:

"If the defendant is considered to have a criminal lifestyle, the court ... must decide whether he has benefited from his ‘general criminal conduct’ and, if so, by how much. ... The burden is on the defendant to rebut any assumption made."

https://www.rahmanravelli.co.uk/expertise/confiscation/confi...

> But how do I prove I own an MP3 file?

Ownership of digital assets is determined by physical possesion and legal ownership of the storage medium in which those assets are.

The only exceptions to this rule are in copyright law (regulating what you can do with a copy you own) and personal data laws such as GDPR.

I own my files because you cannot take them from me. That is all that there is to it.

> But how do I prove I own an MP3 file?

The letters N, F, and T echo about in the background.

Which will then contain a link to the file, since storing the whole file on the chain is too expensive. Still, you'll now pay >50$ for each file, 98% of which are transaction fees - surprisingly surpassing the already horrible pay ratio of music labels.

> Which will then contain a link to the file

Why? You already have a copy on your local machine ("local machine" being anywhere you'd want to play that file). What's more important is the hash; if you really care about remote storage, IPFS kills both those birds with one stone.

> Still, you'll now pay >50$ for each file, 98% of which are transaction fees

There are other NFT-capable blockchains besides Ethereum, you know :)

As someone who loves organizing my music, a file hash would be a shitty solution. I want to be able to edit tags and transcode the song (e.g. for iTunes compatibility) without losing ownership.

As long as you retain the original (which you probably should anyway, especially if you're converting to a lossy format or downloaded it that way in the first place) and can redo the conversion on demand, I don't expect that to be much of an issue.

A Shazam-esque audio fingerprinting approach could work here, too (though obviously IPFS won't give you that for free like it would a file hash). Might be troublesome for remixes, though.

You will also have to cross your fingers that your NFT's link to mediafire.com/MyMP3File stays live for, uh, forever.

Store the file's hash instead?