The news that the NFL was thinking of charging its Super Bowl halftime performers a fee for the right to their 12 minutes of glory before the stupendously large TV audience that is couch-bound on Super Bowl Sunday seems obnoxious enough to me. But it’s even worse than I thought. It’s asking the performers to “contribute a portion of their post-Super Bowl tour income” to the NFL, or to “make some other type of financial contribution.”

There’s a slight smell of extortion here. The implication is “For the privilege of being on our stage for less than fifteen minutes we want a cut of your next tour’s income.”

This is nothing but greed. Performers have apparently been performing for free for quite a while, taking the exposure to that TV audience as payment in kind. But now the NFL, not wealthy enough with its $9 billion in annual revenues (as of 2013), wants to have the artists pay it for the privilege. And how big a percentage of that “post-Super Bowl tour income” will the league demand, and for how long?

I hope no artist takes them up on this.