It’s been a while since I’ve ranted, but a few weeks ago I read an article in the New York Times entitled “The Royalty Scam,” written by Billy Bragg. The purpose of the article was to answer a burning question plaguing the SxSW 2008 music conference: How will musicians make a living in the age of the Internet? Billy thinks Bebo should pay every band some sort of royalty for their contributions to their site. Huh?

“The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.”

Do they? Billy managed to shock me with those three sentences. Granted, I work by day in the Silicon Valley at a non-music Internet startup, but I don’t think that skews my perception that much. Bebo, like MySpace, provides a platform for musicians to showcase their music, reach a new audience, gain exposure, which hopefully will lead to album, ticket and merchandise sales…maybe even a deal with a record label. Musicians’ songs are available to stream, not download, and the artists build their own pages and upload the music.

While I appreciate Billy’s advocacy stance on the behalf of struggling musicians, he can’t truly expect Bebo’s owner to start writing checks to bands that voluntarily posted their music, can he? We visit sites like Bebo, MySpace, and the multi-million dollar website juggernaut HearYa.com to test-drive music before we buy. It’s a way to sample. Why should some ass-clown that has an internet connection, GarageBand software, Casio keyboard, and a dream make royalties from MySpace or Bebo every time some unsuspecting victim has the misfortune of sampling a shitty song? I can see a whole new breed of spam hell-bent on reaping dividends - Band SPAM.

Billy’s heart is in the right place, but he seems to be picking a fight with the wrong people out of bitterness or envy. Technology and the Internet have given us easy access to a wide variety of new music. If you like indie-synth-shoegaze-bluegrass-soul-rap, you can find a band somewhere without having it spoon fed to you by one of five major record labels. What’s that mean? It means that instead of a handful of bands getting rich, a few others making a living, and the masses never signing to a label to get the benefits of production, marketing, and distribution, we now have a paradigm that enables a new class of working musicians to eek out a living. We still have dirt poor musicians and super-rich bands, but we also have a larger middle class, thanks to the accessibility the Internet provides.

Maybe Billy Bragg should stop perpetuating fears about emerging technology and get more involved. Instead of expecting a handout from an Internet entrepreneur, you could collaborate with musicians and thought-leaders to discuss how to leverage these social networks to help bands acquire new customers, distribute merchandise, promote themselves and expand their businesses. Maybe even start your own social network - by musicians for musicians.

Thanks to the new breed of tools offered by the Internet, musicians now have the opportunity to be truly independent. There are more new startups every day and technology is only getting better. And fear not. The majority of us music fans actually do enjoy the act of purchasing music - Radiohead proved that by offering their album for donations.