Media futurish Gerd Leonhard has a thoughtful podcast on ISPs, compensation and how these issues will become tangled as computer usage and broadband connections explode in the coming years. He says it is time to switch to a revenue-based license model that will create flat rate access to music. There is enough advertising revenue out there, he believes, to cover everybody. "The key is to license the pipeline, the faucet" he summarized, "not the bottle."

The podcast is a 45,000-foot overview of how ISPs will become engaged in licensing. For most people, I'm sure the nuts and bolts are impossible to imagine. Where is all this ad revenue and how will it be booked? Who is going to get together all the stakeholders to collaborate on a solution? Will the Beatles catalog be covered? Just imagining all the cat herding required to make such a monumental change is mind numbing.

Blog post is here. MP3 of the podcast file is here.