This is an absolute amazing interview with Peter Jenner. Peter is a world famous rock promoter and manager, who helped guide the careers of Pink Floyd, Billy Bragg, and a bunch of other awesome acts.

This interview is Peter’s take on what the future of the music industry looks like, and to him, it looks like a community.

He also goes into great detail about how royalties are dispersed. Basically, there’s a bunch of money paid to collection societies for licenses and performaces of music. Groups like ASCAP and BMI collect the money for their members, and then pay out the money quarterly.

So what happens to all the money that isn’t paid when artists can’t be found, or it’s unclear who the money goes to? Peter tells us about black boxes, or a big bucket where all that money sits. Now, in the real world, this has worked out fairly well for almost everyone. Plenty of artists are able to receive small check of less than dollar for what they’re owed. No one in the industry will admit these black boxes exist. Now that digital licensing is moving toward a post DRM (we hope) phase, the conversation is shifting toward how the money will be collected, and distributed.

The major news mongers report that major labels want to set up a structure for collection and disbursement of royalties through them, because they own so many copyrights. Where will that leave the independent musician, who has no right to audit a major label they’re not on?

Peter is an absolute genius, and if you haven’t seen his interview yet, check it out. His insights are profound, and he clearly knows what he’s talking about. My favorite insight form his article is his observation that unbundling albums online (selling singles) has ahd mroe of an impact on the death of record sales than any other factor. His thoughts on how major labels have “raped their own business model” are absolute genius.

So if you haven’t read it yet, check it out.