I am trying to understand an idea that Richard Stallman proposed to promote music “in the age of computer networking.” This is from an article titled Ending the War on Sharing: https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

We could support musical artists with public funds distributed directly to them in proportion to the cube root of their popularity. Using the cube root means that if superstar A is 1000 times as popular as skilled artist B, A will get 10 times as much of the tax funds as B. This way of dividing the money is an efficient way to promote a broad diversity of music.

The law should ensure that record companies cannot confiscate these funds from the artists, since experience shows they will try. To speak of “compensating” the “rights holder” is a veiled way of proposing to give most of the money to the record companies in the name of the artists.

These funds could come from the general budget, or from a special tax on something vaguely correlated with listening to music, such as blank disks or Internet connectivity. Either way would do the job.

What I’m having trouble understanding is whether the artist (musicians in this case) is getting paid per-listen, or if they are getting paid as a percentage of the total fund.

Is the idea that if an artist was responsible for 8% of the songs played on a platform, they would get 2% of the funding?

Has anyone else read about this idea? I wish it had been explained a bit better.

EDIT: I emailed RMS and he replied. Here is how the cube root system would work. I have labeled the quotes for clarity:

RMS: I am assuming a program managed by the state, which measures the popularity of each musician and distributes a certain pool of money among them.

auomaticdoor75: Let’s use a very simple example: let’s say there’s a treasury that will pay out $10,000 to three different artists. Artist A was responsible for 67% of the songs played on the platform, Artist B was responsible for 20% of the songs played, and Artist C was responsible for 13% of the songs played. Using your cube-root idea, how much money would each artist receive?

RMS: The cube roots are 0.8750340239643772, 0.584803579016074, 0.5065797363612384 Add them and you get 1.9664173393416897.

The A gets (/ 0.8750340239643772 1.9664173393416897) = 0.444988968749288 of the total.

B gets (/ 0.584803579016074 1.9664173393416897) = 0.29739545482845087 of the total.

C gets (/ 0.5065797363612384 1.9664173393416897) = 0.2576155764222611 of the total.

I do not say that the cube root is the perfect function to use. It gives an example of how such a system can work. A different function might be better.

So, it seems like you find the cube root of each person’s percentage of the web traffic, divided by the sum of all the cube roots. The resulting quotient is that person’s share of the treasury.