After Portfolio.com reported that Warner Music Group was exploring the idea of adding a monthly fee to consumers' internet-access bills to pay for music downloads, the digital music community rose up to ask: What about us?

"It's the talk of the industry right now," Phil Crosland, the marketing chief of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, said.

Crosland added that he doesn't care if it's Warner's plan or anyone else's. "Let's just make sure we have the songwriters, composers, and music publishers covered in any solution," he said.

Across the internet, the nascent fee proposal put forth by Warner Music executive Jim Griffin was denounced as an authoritarian "culture tax" that would fatten industry coffers even as it was praised as a visionary solution that treats music like a utility and spreads the cost across the entire population.

But amid all of the sound and fury over the concept—which Griffin emphasizes is still in the earliest stages of development—one key constituency has been largely overlooked: independent musicians.

Griffin said he wants to create "a collective society for the digital age" to work with ASCAP and other industry groups like Broadcast Music Inc. and the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers. These "performance-rights organizations" collect royalties from radio stations, restaurants, malls, and podcasters, then distribute money to artists and rights holders.

Many independent musicians, however, say they have serious reservations about Griffin's plan.

One of them, singer-songwriter Samantha Murphy, said she fears that any collective licensing model will shortchange independent artists like her—musicians who are not affiliated with a corporate music publisher—unless they are granted "a seat at the table" to help shape the plan's contours.