Yes, it is right that they seek royalties
... In spite of all the crap incompetent punters are uttering here.
Why is it right? It's the economics, stupid!
The way to achieve efficiency for the distribution of goods in a society is to have goods be sold at marginal price.
This is because selling at less than production price incites people to spend the goods without a need proportionate to the cost, and selling higher than that cost makes people shy out from buying, which reduces the amount of pleasure (total) derived from a product. What is important for efficiency is not the transfer of money (whether it's in one pocket or the other, it's there somewhere, you could always tax it back idf needed) but the fact that the price is right.
In our case here, it implies that the cost should be 0. It costs nothing to duplicate a song, so it should cost nothing. Not because of any ideology, but for practical, efficiency reasons: if I value listening to a crap song at 1c and it costs nothing to the producer, why should I be deprived of the pleasure, and the producer of the money? what if I value it 0.5c? 001c?
So music in our age should be free.
That has been very well understood for a long time, you don't pay per hour you listen to radio.
But then you need to make the business live (not necessarily the major, but the industry as a whole, whatever parts of it are necessary).
But you can't ask people to pay per song, not even to pay for the right to listen in an unlimited manner, because the price will always be too high for someone who would have been ready to pay half that. So in that case it's pleasure lost for the guy, AND money lost for the industry => inefficient.
The only optimal solution, as has been known by economists for around 2.5 centuries now, is to make everyone pay for the good of all. You get to pay a price whatever you do, that way you're then free to benefit from the full service. Some end up losers, as they pay more than they value the fact of listening to whatever they want whenever they want, but pricing them out would increase the cost for others, which would in turn deter some of those, which increases the price for those who are left, and so on.
This is why a levy of some kind is THE right way to go, as anyone with a good economic background and no vested interest in one side or the other, will tell you (THE right way assuming it is at all possible to put it into place, but then that's not an ideological question anymore, as opposed to what I can read above).
For information, I'm NOT a major lovers, quite the opposite, I consider them parasites which have outlived their usefulness, but still, that's not a reason to say that a levy is not in itself a good thing (though as very well pointed out by the good journalist you're criticizing without good cause, it would be better if raised by an organization that as the artists' well-being at heart).
Also note that all of you are paying for the wellfare of all, for the public roads they're not using, for the army, for whatever thing you cannot efficiently ask people to pay a contribution of their own choice, because the good of the society as a whole mandates that you don't give people a choice - even if they're in good health or have a personnal insurance and so don't care about Medicaid/NHS/whatever social health service there is in your country.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
