by Helienne Lindvall
At this week’s Midem music conference in Cannes, France, I sat down with electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre, whose career as an artist and composer is now in its fifth decade, having broken through internationally with his groundbreaking Oxygene album in 1976. Last year, he took over the presidency of CISAC, the global body for authors’ societies, after the previous president, Robin Gibb, passed away – and so his Midem “visionary talk” went under the headline Fair Share for Creators.
Jarre:
“We should never forget that in the smartphone, the smart part is us creators. If you get rid of music, images, videos, words and literature from the smartphone, you just have a simple phone that would be worth about $50. Let’s accept that there’s a lot of innovation in the smartphone, so let’s add $100 for this innovation – the remaining $300-$400 of the price should go to us.
So we should sit down and talk to all the telephone companies and computer companies selling hardware, the companies carrying the content on the internet, such as Facebook and Google. We need each other, so at the end of the day we have to find the right partnership. We are talking about a business partnership, not a tax, and this shouldn’t affect the consumer.”
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AT MUSIC TECHNOLOGY POLICY:
http://musictechpolicy.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/jean-michel-jarre-dont-forget-that-us-creators-are-the-smart-part-in-a-smartphone-by-helienne-lindvall/
The Trichordist 
My business partner, legendary producer Rupert Hine, was at this conference this past week and I believe was on a panel. We’re working on a non-profit solution here in the UK (which will eventually be a global solution) to add a new revenue stream to the music industry that changes how we perceive copyright and bridges the widening gap between rights holders and rights users…that gap being infringement. This is a partnership between not only tech companies, but creators, and users as well. You’ll hear about our project soon…but…
…what it comes down to is that the reason there is a vibrant tech industry…is because a lot has been built on the backs of creators via infringement without a clear mechanism to compensate them. It’s very easy to postulate the argument saying that music or media can’t survive without technology and the tech titans…but without the music or media…it would be a very empty web. I would postulate that the majority of everything we see or do online is directly connected to a work of copyright. Time to start waking up to the reality that we’re on a declining slope of revenue which will in time damage the quality and availability of content we currently take for granted.