To continue my oft-expressed admiration for satellite radio, the other day I heard on XM a full version of Sir Arthur Sullivan's 1872 Festival Te Deum.

ArkivMusic (my current go-to site because its index for classical beats Amazon hollow) failed me, as did my back-up Amazon one-click, so I queried XM VOX for a disc number. (Another reason why everyone should be subscribing to satellite radio is the speed and courtesy with which such emails are answered.)

The response was that this was a live BBC broadcast -- no CD. I expressed surprise, and VOX answered: "Actually, a lot of VOX programming is rare, out-of-print, or not available anywhere else."

Indeed the only full recording of the work that I can find is this freebie distributed with the BBC Magazine in March 2001. I queried a used-CD site without success, then struck gold on eBay.

Basically, I side with the record industry in its current dispute with XM, but this episode certainly gives one reason to mourn how unnecessary that dispute is. It would be easy for XM to capture its broadcasts of these rare and out-of-print works and make them available over the Internet. There is not a huge market for this work -- my eBay cost was $0.99+S&H (I was the only bidder and I got the cello concerto as well, altogether a total steal) -- but given that the BBC was going to perform it anyway, the marginal costs of capturing and distributing it are low, and with some promotion over XM, everyone involved could make some money out of it, which would of course encourage more productions and more broadcasts of more rare works.

Had I not found the CD on eBay, and were I a P2Per, I would, I confess, have gone hunting it online without a qualm (at least, if I had not seen the recent USPTO Report).

But free P2P is simply not a good long-term answer. There is no reason why I should get it for free -- I don't even want it to be free. I want to pay, as a responsible member of the classical-music-loving community. (See Please Make Me Pay! Markets And Intellectual Property & Do You Really Want to be a Product?)

There are some multiple institutional failures here -- institutional in the sense of both legal doctrines and organizational structures -- that do not allow or nurture business evolutions that would obviously be to everyone's benefit. The major task of IP thinkers should be calculating how to get rid of these failures and foster the production and distribution of IP as the synergistic commercial/ artistic enterprise that it must be, and that it can be.

posted by James DeLong @ 8:00 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines..., Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

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