This is an idea that came to me from nowhere a few nights ago, as I sat playing solitaire and listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

As far as I can tell, a musician's job isn't so much harder than any other profession so as to warrant the immense amounts of money they earn. They live lives of ridiculous luxury, simply for writing a few songs and getting suckers to buy their CDs. Piracy plagues our society, and as extortionate as the price of a CD is, it is indeed stealing. Taxpayers' money is spent each year trying to reduce piracy, but to little end.

I think I can solve both problems

Let's say that, from now on, we pay a music tax. Just as portions of our taxes collectively pay for libraries, schools, roads, hospitals and other such neccessities, a portion of our taxes would go to the newly-formed 'Department of Music'. This Department would, in turn, pay registered musicians. The musicians' pay could thus be regulated, so they would finally start being paid reasonable amounts of money.

Hold on, just hear me out.

In this day and age, most music is acquired and listened to in a digital form, be it on a computer or Mp3 player. Granted, not all music follows this rule, but a significant and reprisentative amount of all music does. Google has developed a thangit called 'Google Music Trends' that collects play-count data from people's computers, and can thus tell you which Mp3s are being played the most this week. A similar system could be implemented in order to ascertain sufficient data to calculate each artist's pay. An artist whose songs are listened to more gets paid more than one whose songs get listened to less. This could be represented with the following formula: (Pay) = K * (play-count), where K is some monetary constant.

This way, music could be distributed for free without any piracy issues, as it is not the act of acquisition that makes money for the artist, but the act of listening. There is no insentive for people to intentionally skew their play-counts, as they pay the same tax either way.

Now, one could argue that this system is unfair, as those who don't listen to music still pay the music tax, but someone who never goes to a public hospital still pays that portion of their tax, do they not?

A few people have said that this system is getting close to communism, but I disagree. The artists still get paid more for making better music. The artists would still own their songs, and royalities would still be paid.