New Tax On Downloaded Music
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- October 19th, 2007
- Posted In:
- Music
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An article in the Financial Post reports that “The Copyright Board of Canada has approved new taxes on digital MP3 music files“. This new tax will apply to all legally downloaded music and will cost 3.1 cents for individual tracks and 1.5 cents per track if you download an entire album.
"The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), which collects money on behalf of musicians and redistributes those funds to songwriters and bands, had called for the levies."
SOCAN has traditionally dealt with collecting money from radio stations and re-distributing that money to musicians. They’re also responsible for the Blank Tape Levy attached to the sale of blank tapes/CDs/MP3 players. So far it’s all been justified (the Blank Tape Levy is questionable) but this new tax is just a tax meant to pay musicians more money after you’ve given the musicians money by buying their music. Sounds great, right?
"Meant to compensate artists for the reproduction of their songs, the charges follow similar levies that add 21 cents to the price of every blank CD sold in Canada. And they are retroactive to 1996, when Canada’s music industry first began pushing for tariffs on transmitted music files."
Really this will just work like everything else works with SOCAN, the rich artists get richer and everyone else gives up and gets day jobs. On top of everything it’s retroactive 11 years! Puretracks says they’ve been putting money away over the years in case this ever happened but I bet other companies aren’t so lucky.
Is this how we fix the music industry? Blatantly rip off fans buying music legally and maybe bankrupt some companies selling music legally? Nice, dicks.
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