Music Taxes???

Tarek

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Stumbled upon this on a forum..very interesting..

The Music Industry’s New Extortion Scheme
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by Michael Arrington on March 27, 2008

Update: More details of the scheme are here.
Musicians themselves may just be crazy, but the music labels are dangerously stupid, and need to be stopped before they can do any further damage to the music industry. Case in point: Warner Music, fully aware that the days of charging for recorded music are coming to an end, is now pushing for a music tax.
This isn’t the first time someone has called for a music tax. Peter Jenner argued for it in Europe in 2006. Trent Reznor said the same thing last year (as did the Songwriters Association of Canada). Mathew Ingram has other examples.
But Warner Music is doing more than just talking about a music tax. They’ve hired industry veteran Jim Griffin to create a new entity that would create a pool of money from user fees to be distributed to artists and copyright holders. Lawsuits against their customers aren’t working (The RIAA sent out 5,400 letters in the last year, says Portfolio, settling with 2,300 of those individuals and suing 2,465 who didn’t respond).
The goal? $5 per month from everyone, or fees of $20 billion per year. That’s double the current size of the recorded music industry ($10 billion)
READ MORE:The Music Industry’s New Extortion Scheme
 
heh, a lot of debates are coming up also in Canada, a new bill was suggested that all Canadians pay small fee (that included in their internet bill) that will go to the labels etc. So means that ISP's such as shaw, rogers sympatico will ask higher rates monthly for internet usage, in that fee there will be some % set for music.

Seems like this is kinda the idea not only in Canada but also in a few countries that reside in Europe. I have been following this for about a year now, since Afterhours.FM is based in Toronto, Ontario Canada, and abides by the legal regulatory and licensing body the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission or CRTC thereafter.

Interesting article Michael Geist - Canadian Podcasting Royalty Down But Not Out worth a read, more Michael Geist - Blog
 
tax on music eh?...what's next, they gonna have an entry fee to the music stores?

this whole thing is getting ridiculous now, while i fully agree that artists should be supported, over the past few years, ever since RIAA started all the debates supposedly for the benefit of the artists, i feel that the whole thing has shifted from that original intention to a crusade of making money whichever way possible and a very small fraction of it for the benefit of those artists.
 
not uncommon in various shapes in at least some places in europe. most prominently today (from my point of view) in austria and germany as a sort of tax on some recordable audio media, mostly CD-Rs today.

it started many years ago, in the age of audio cassette tapes, when cassettes were the most common format for buying music. everyone and their mother went and bought blank tapes and copied all the music from all their friends, and then copied it off again to other people. so the music industry went and pushed through a law to tax blank tapes. they would suddenly cost more, with the additional costs basically being royalties. nobody really complained though, because everyone knew that blank cassettes weren't really used for much anything else.

then the age of the CD arrived. it took them a while, but eventually they managed to tax blank CD-Rs in the same way. it doesn't matter if you use them for audio or data CDs, the blank CDs would just cost more. this doesn't make much sense any more, as obviously CDs can be used for many other things as well, most importantly for carrying data, backups etc, and they are indeed being used for that, but they still pushed the law through. if you prove to them that you didn't use the CDs for copying music, you can actually get your money back. not that anyone actually does that though.
 
at some point im all for - if offcourse the money are divided properly (which almost never happens) :)
 

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