¶ … monetization of the file sharing of music from the songwriters and recording artists of Canada. The primary audience for this piece is songwriters and recording artists as well as other interested parties who are concerned that these performers usually receive no compensation when their music is shared or illegally downloaded from the Web. The proposal is concise and well written. It starts out strong by gaining your empathy, but falls short in getting you to support its recommendations.

Proposal Strengths

The proposal's strengths lie in its research and documentation of the tremendous scope of the file sharing/download problem. Supporting evidence includes the ratio of shared files to purchased downloads, an amazing 98 to 2 as well as the widespread availability of songs through P2P file sharing which has come to total more than 79 million recordings. This research highlights the importance of identifying a problem to promote interest in and support for making a suggested change in a proposal.

Proposal Weaknesses

Essentially, the proposal is to make sharing music entirely legal and to give creators and rights holders their share of a $5.00 per Internet subscription each month. However, this proposal does virtually nothing to show you that its proposal is reasonable and would actually work.

For starters, everyone who has an Internet account does not necessarily engage in sharing music and public protest for supporting the license fee might potentially be quite larger. Therefore, it would have been useful to have some credible estimate of what percentage of Internet users actually shares music.

The proposal makes the assertion that the license fee would adequately compensate the industry for years of declining sales and lost revenues. Yet, it makes no calculations of what the annual losses currently are and what the collection of license fees would be. There are plenty of estimates of Internet users in Canada, so the association could have calculated the total fees. Also, the association could have easily documented declining revenues.

The proposal loses all credibility when it asserts that services such as iTunes and PureTracks would continue to license their music directly. This proposal clearly makes these businesses obsolete.

The lessons learned here are to always provide data to support recommendations and to acknowledge rather than gloss over limitations of a proposal.

Bibliography

Songwriters Association of Canada. http://www.songwriters.ca/studio/proposal.php