This weekend in the course of a discussion of piracy, copyright, intellectual property and the future of content creation with my brother-in-law (and by conversation, I mean: “I talked at him for 20 minutes after which he said something very poignant I hadn’t thought of yet”) we together came to an interesting idea.

Copyright, I lectured, was intended to provide content authors with protection of an idea for a “limited” (c.f. The Constitution) period of time to encourage creative work. That is, to ensure one could be the exclusive financial benefactor of your creation for a limited period of time, after which it would pass into public domain for the good of culture, and to force the creator to move on to other work and continue creating. Read your Lessig for detail on this.

I had also belabored the difference between creation and copy in a physical vs. digital world—read your Negroponte for more on that—which lead to a discussion of the fact that the production of a an entire album of music used to be necessary because no one would buy an cassette, album, or CD with just one track on it for a price agreeable to consumers and producers.

At which point he offered, “Why does it make sense to create an album for months or years, sell it, and then ‘Do Nothing’ for a long time.” Of course, “Do Nothing” isn’t meant literally, but the brilliance of the statement is still opening to me 48 hours later.

The album is a construct forced upon us by the old way of selling music. There’s got to be a better way. Barriers to entry are falling fast–you can make a pretty damn good song in a few hours using Garageband, and distribute it for a fraction of a minutia of the cost. Some people are already looking for a different model, but no one is doing this: What if instead of buying an album every 18 months, I could “subscribe” to artists for $20 or $50 bucks a year, which got me tons of premium content—blogs, music, videos, interviews, documentaries, whatever—all delivered digitally all the time. Every month a few songs, a few videos, some articles, etc.

If 20,000 fans who would buy a CD for $10 or $15 could convert (and who knows if they would) to 10,000 fans who would “subscribe” for $20 a year, well, that’s a more engaged (read: evangelizing) fan with more content to enjoy (and share), and an artist that can capitalize on a smaller fan base (with higher margins) and churn out more types of content (Shakespeare didn’t only write plays). And what if you had 50,000 fans? Or a million?

I only claim participatory credit for this idea. And it may be crazy—I can’t decide if this is just a “fan club” or not—but sometimes crazy ideas work.