There’s potential for grander-scale initiatives too—like entertainment lawyer Henderson Cole’s radical proposal for an American Music Library. He envisages this as a government-financed digital public music library, which, like a public library for books, could be accessed by any American for free. Artists and composers would opt in by uploading their music and their labels and publishers would be barred from stopping them. As Pelly points out, “we don’t currently conceptualize universal access to music as a public good, to be managed in the public interest with public funding. We should.”

In Cole’s vision, a music library could also have a preservation role, keeping copies of uploaded music for future generations. But what he is perhaps most excited about is the possibility of a new royalty system that bypasses the insane complexity and wastefulness of the one we have now.