by SHANE SINNOTT

Well, well, well. It looks like the major record labels may be finally—finally —moving towards a more appropriate system for distributing and collecting music royalties. It’s far too early to tell, but news revealed this week indicated that Warner is talking to several American universities about “Voluntary Blanket Licensing,” a fancy term for a fee paid by college students in exchange for free-for-all file-sharing on campus. The Web site TechDirt has somehow acquired the Powerpoint presentation given to colleges proposing the idea, which you can see at tinyurl.com/5lbjxn.

While that site is against the idea—they see it as a tax being levied by a lazy industry in exchange for nothing other than a promise not to sue—I agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation that this is a fundamental and major step forward (read their take at tinyurl.com/6brtzk). In the spirit of Christmas, I offer this: we can be unrealistic with what we expect from these labels at times. Major record companies are never going to apologize to every artist they’ve fucked over and thank us for downloading their music for free. A flat fee—we’ll throw you a little cash, you look the other way on the downloading—is about as realistic as we can get at this point. Seriously, we need to move on. Let’s not go into 2009 with music downloaders being sued. I beg!

Two new things that are not-so-great imitations of the artists’ earlier work: AC Newman’s “Submarines of Stockholm” (tinyurl.com/5n7k2m) and Eminem’s “Number 1” (tinyurl.com/5m3med). Newman’s track is from his forthcoming Get Guilty, and manages to be pretty good and pretty uninteresting at the same time. Eminem’s, which is unmastered and possibly unfinished, is from a forthcoming who-knows-what, and his form seems less than stellar—“Let your body waddle/Don’t act like a snobby model.” Ugh.

Finally, here are your Christmas songs, jerks: “Christmas in Baghdad” by the Black Lips (tinyurl.com/5r4d9l), and to even it out, “Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis,” which is Neko Case covering Tom Waits, at tinyurl.com/63fqwt.