Over at Slate is an interesting article about the future of the music industry. As music companies face plummeting revenues, industry bigwigs are concocting all sorts of plans to ensure the industry’s survival. One such plan: Add a $5 per customer, per month tax onto all Internet service plans. In exchange, music lovers would get to download whatever they wanted (with no more DRM format) and pay nothing.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has condemned this idea as a “music tax” and “the music industry’s extortion scheme.” Though the proposal is not technically a tax-rather, it’s a call for “voluntary blanket licensing agreements”-it will certainly feel like one. And instead of paying for roads, schools, and bombs, you would be helping to keep record executives in cigars and the finest silks. As Arrington argues, there is good reason to believe that this huge pot of money will turn the music industry into a lazy near-monopoly that lives off of fat royalty checks. Once the majors get this guaranteed revenue stream, won’t they just spend all their time scheming to increase the fee from $5 per customer per month to $7.50? There’s also the small matter that not all Internet users listen to or download popular music. If this plan somehow goes through, millions of moms and dads who pay for Net access so junior can browse Britannica Online will find that they are subsidizing the hedonistic lifestyles of America’s most-tattooed singing sensations.

Yet, Slate’s Reihan Salam writes that “something like the music tax simply has to happen” because “piracy can’t be stopped.” He advocates for a reward system that eliminates middlemen and encourages creativity, but he supports a plan that puts the government in charge.

The feds would levy a small tax on all broadband subscribers. Musicians, signed and unsigned, would register their creations with the U.S. Copyright Office, who would then set up a massive Nielsen-style sample of music listeners to track the popularity of different songs. The more your song is played, the more you get paid. The revenue from the tax would be parceled out to the copyright holders.

But do we really want the government running yet another area of our life–or does the idea have potential?