Earlier today at SXSW, digital media strategist Jim Griffin led a panel discussion about the feasibility of a flat fee mdel for compensating artists and record labels for downloads.

It's an idea I've been hearing since the earliest days of the Napster lawsuits, and without having been present at the panel myself, I have to point out that there are a couple of precedents. First, there's the surcharge on CD-Rs which has been in place in Canada for years, and that hasn't exactly deterred the CRIA from filing lawsuits against downloaders.

In addition, doesn't this closely parallel the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service, or any of the other subscription music plans we've seen over the years? Even the price point is about the same; remember, Yahoo! launched the service in 2005 at a special introductory price of $6.99 a month.

One crucial difference, of course, is that if Griffin's proposal is adopted and the tech world is allowed to lead the way, MP3 will undoubtedly dominate as the audio format of choice. That's good news for consumers and fair use and so on, but it's hard to believe that securing the necessary licenses for DRM-free distribution could actually be cheaper than the licenses required for Yahoo's DRM-ridden service.

The most obvious potential difficulty is logistical, but you have to be both an accountant and a database to have even the faintest of ideas how to go about tracking and distributing the royalties, so I'll skip over that for the moment.

In addition, though, cautious critics of the plan are pointing out that it should be an opt-in fee, after which the customer is effectively immune to prosecution in the ongoing legal initiative. That's not terribly realistic, because the odds of being targeted are already infinitesimal so the lawsuits alone are not likely to serve as enough of a deterrent, and for the less principled among us, the immunity wouldn't really be enough of a return for your five bucks.

But that said, most of the musicians and fans I know would pay $5 a month in a heartbeat -- or even more -- for access to the kind of library Griffin seems to be proposing. Whether that would ultimately be enough to save the existing music industry is a different question entirely.

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