Paying the musicians: can we legitimise piracy with distributed patronage? 
Synopsis: people steal music. Stealing music is good for the listener but bad for the artist. Can we build a system to help mitigate the bad effects of this theft while benefiting the producers of music?

With the rise of Bittorrent and the collapse of the traditional music market, two things have happened. On one hand as an audience, should we choose, we have unprecedented access to music. A well connected and technically savvy listener can acquire almost any track in their choice of bitrate, unencumbered by DRM, within minutes of deciding they want it - without paying a cent. We've found a way to beat the record labels at their own racket, which has the potential to bring amazing benefits to us music lovers.

On the other hand, artists have all but lost the revenue stream which they could formerly expect from sales of CDs and other recordings. Some of them manage to make a living through live performances and the sale of merchandise, and may even approve of piracy as a means to reach and attract more people to their concerts, but the fact is that for the most part, an already cruelly difficult career path has been made completely unviable for many.

Assuming (perhaps generously) that most people actually want to support the artists whose music they listen to, and are willing to pay enough for it to sustain the industry, perhaps there is a way to turn this state of affairs into a system that nurtures the artists. Only a small fraction of the sales from traditional media ever arrived in the hands of the artist; a new, more efficient system (one in which the traditional role of labels is largely absent) might reward artists as well as the traditional one did, at a substantially lower cost to consumers than the purchase of CDs.

What I'm suggesting is a service, probably in the form of a non-profit organisation, which accepts and distributes payments from consumers to producers of music, directly, and without raking their profits. I might choose to pay a certain amount per month to the artists I listen to; an intelligent system could scrobble the tracks I listen to each month, divide my monthly "subscription" according to my usage, and deliver a "donation" directly into the account of each artist. Or, I might choose to pay for each track I download, or simply donate a lump sum to one of my favourite artists.

The service itself would be responsible for facilitating these transactions, both by providing technical and financial infrastructure, and by ensuring that information about how to pay the artists - their bank details, in a nutshell - are correct and appropriate. There would be a fraud risk; I would have a strong incentive to provide an account number of my own and claim to be a high profile artist. There are also ethical challenges surrounding independent labels which may actually deserve a cut of the takings. We can also count on the RIAA using every tactic it possibly can to shut down the service.

However, these problems seem surmountable; there are a lot of smart people here, and to me it seems that there is a yawning vacuum left by the collapse of last century's labels which a culture of patronage might fill. Perhaps as the way we consume art is transformed by technology, our best hope for fostering the arts is a democratised, distributed spiritual successor to the system that helped to sustain artists through the Renaissance.

Discuss.