“A tangent: The EFF points out that this plan will aid independents; similar sentiments were expressed at the Digital Music Forum. I certainly agree, but I think that the current online music stores will also help indies.”

Actually, I don’t really see how VCL helps less popular artists. The sampling methods that would be used to divide up money would “throw away” less popular work. The only way to get around that is to sample more and more, which would raise other concerns.

The relevant question is the tradeoff between sampling accuracy and the popularity cutoff.