A Solid Call 2.0

Grey Tuesday : The protest over EMI's attempts to stop Danger Mouse's The Grey Album is coalescing into a 1-day free-for-all posting of the album. GreyTuesday.org advocates indie webmasters posting the tracks for download on Feb 24. -- or at least making your site grey all day.

My take is that EMI should license it, but this "protest" is probably not the best way to go about it. Why not sell the album for $8 and cut a check to EMI for what you think a fair royalty cut would be? Obviously that's much harder and gutsier, but I think it would be a much more sincere and meaningful statement. Of course if only 37 people bought it, you wouldn't have much of a story... but those are the sort of numbers that the copyright holder (EMI) has to look at when considering this kind of thing. They can't spend time licensing every request that comes across their desk. If this was licensed, how much would it sell? Giving it away for free will not be a good indicator of that -- and will possibly do more to hurt the cause of compulsory licensing.

Food for thought, I guess.