Canadian Music Group Proposes ‘Copyright Tax’ on Internet Use

[Uzume]

Yet more rent seeking behaviour by an hopelessly out of date/touch industry 

 

[AlTech]

Really glad I don't live in Canada.

[yian88]

Basically this :  "I make no money and no living from being indie young game developer, so how about we impose a socialist tax on everyone so i can make a living?"  You know people might look at other people playing videogames but they didnt pay for that game so lets have an eye tax on everyone.

 

Just because you make a product you are not entitled to its revenues if you dont know how to market your product. Marketing is the most important part of any product, if you cant market it well enough it wont sell. Fuck socialism.

[mr moose]

9 hours ago, yian88 said:

Just because you make a product you are not entitled to its revenues if you dont know how to market your product. Marketing is the most important part of any product, if you cant market it well enough it wont sell. Fuck socialism.

It has nothing to do with marketing from the musicians end (not even the record company for that matter), and they are entitled to revenue from that product, what they can't do is force people to buy through a taxation law.  

 

How Streaming Is Changing Music (Again).URL

[Thaldor]

11 hours ago, mr moose said:

-snip-  Because of this bands are getting less, record companies are getting worse and demanding more, manufactured music and manufactured content is out of control. Once upon a time getting your record into a shop was enough to live off, now you have to sell out shows every other week if you don't want to have to work a 9-5er.

-snip-

Just wanted to cherry pick something. Record companies and managers were always the worst, it's a thing from before the internet for them to offer basicly zero contracts (manager gets 90% of live sells and record company takes 90% of record sales, you are bound to this for 5 records and if you fail to produce a record that gets to top lists or cross X revenue, you loose the contract and get nothing), also they were the first to notice one big thing in services like Spotify: They no longer can make people buy 10-20€ album because of one track that got to be played in the radio and is actually good, this is why they, at least first I'm not sure how it is today, marked Spotify as "ad platform" and took 99% of the revenue from it. And there's been a lot of artist in the courts fighting against these contracts later when they noticed how bad they actually were. Also haven't seen nay record company tuning down their outputs, having mass dismissals or even nose diving revenues, more or less there's new record companies coming up and the old ones do as well as ever or even a lot better than before.

 

Then about working... Excuse me for my bad language. Knowing few studio/backing artists who do well, they are basicly small entrepreneurs; The harder they work, the more money they get; 1-2 gigs hopefully per week meanwhile working on new material for other artists and doing studio work and if nothing else training. And then there's "artists" who complain that they don't make enough money to buy a new BMW while they do a gig a month (if they want) and actually do studio work couple months to release their yearly album. Like is it some kind of impossibility that they don't make enough money because they work only when they want to? No, it must be pirates, definedly pirates, nothing else can possibly explain why they don't make enough money to buy that new BMW (\s). [Of course there's a lot of variables and no matter how hard you try you may not get that 1 gig a week even 1 gig a month and even if you get they might be for empty places, but that's kind of the life they choose. I have being an entrepreneur and god is that hard life, getting enough customers and doing what they want me to do and all the billing and everything and it was literally 24/7 work in the start. So, I kind of don't really understand why someone can complain about not getting enough money when they work when they feel like it.]

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

Just wanted to cherry pick something. Record companies and managers were always the worst, it's a thing from before the internet for them to offer basicly zero contracts (manager gets 90% of live sells and record company takes 90% of record sales, you are bound to this for 5 records and if you fail to produce a record that gets to top lists or cross X revenue, you loose the contract and get nothing),

Yes there are some shit things about them, but they weren't always like that, back in the day many record companies signed you up for X albums and they paid everything up front, they actually invested in the musicians.   Is it wrong to to expect a ROI from such an investment?  Remember that what they do today is not what they did in the 80's or earlier.

 

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

also they were the first to notice one big thing in services like Spotify: They no longer can make people buy 10-20€ album because of one track that got to be played in the radio and is actually good, this is why they, at least first I'm not sure how it is today, marked Spotify as "ad platform" and took 99% of the revenue from it. And there's been a lot of artist in the courts fighting against these contracts later when they noticed how bad they actually were. Also haven't seen nay record company tuning down their outputs, having mass dismissals or even nose diving revenues, more or less there's new record companies coming up and the old ones do as well as ever or even a lot better than before.

Already linked to an article from harved business that explains this,  Basically revenues has more than halved while available content has more than tripped.  And we must remember that the revenue from increased album sales halved long before streaming became a thing.

 

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

 

No, it must be pirates, definedly pirates, nothing else can possibly explain why they don't make enough money to buy that new BMW (\s). [Of course there's a lot of variables and no matter how hard you try you may not get that 1 gig a week even 1 gig a month and even if you get they might be for empty places, but that's kind of the life they choose. I have being an entrepreneur and god is that hard life, getting enough customers and doing what they want me to do and all the billing and everything and it was literally 24/7 work in the start. So, I kind of don't really understand why someone can complain about not getting enough money when they work when they feel like it.]

 

Until someone can explain away the figures with a better postulation,  internet piracy has been the biggest effector in the business. 

 

https://www.economist.com/business/2009/11/12/singing-a-different-tune

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/05/11/music-piracy-looks-like-2017/

http://copyright.nova.edu/copyright-piracy-entertainment-industries/

 

Keep in mind all these studies and conclusions where drawn between 2007 and 2014 before legal streaming services started to have an impact on revenue and sales. There is no debate when it comes to the effects piracy has on music revenue.

 

 

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Yes there are some shit things about them, but they weren't always like that, back in the day many record companies signed you up for X albums and they paid everything up front, they actually invested in the musicians.   Is it wrong to to expect a ROI from such an investment?  Remember that what they do today is not what they did in the 80's or earlier.

At least in Finland there was quite a huge wave of legal battles mostly artists vs. managers and record companies because their contracts were bad (most of the contracts were from 80's and early 90's IIRC). And all started when one artist got a high court ruling that her manager needed to pay her few hunderd tousands euros of royalties that were not paid because contract made in the 80's was something like "XX 000 now and nothing later because all the rights are mine" which went very much against the copyright laws even back in the 80's. And all you get from reading through band biographies (mostly rock and metal bands) is that at some time every and each of them kicked many managers out because they were taking hefty amounts of incomes.

 

Quote

Already linked to an article from harved business that explains this,  Basically revenues has more than halved while available content has more than tripped.  And we must remember that the revenue from increased album sales halved long before streaming became a thing.

 

 

Until someone can explain away the figures with a better postulation,  internet piracy has been the biggest effector in the business. 

 

https://www.economist.com/business/2009/11/12/singing-a-different-tune

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/05/11/music-piracy-looks-like-2017/

http://copyright.nova.edu/copyright-piracy-entertainment-industries/

 

Keep in mind all these studies and conclusions where drawn between 2007 and 2014 before legal streaming services started to have an impact on revenue and sales. There is no debate when it comes to the effects piracy has on music revenue.

 It's funny how all of those threat physical sales as the great golden goose, because it's still the bigest income. Last one even turns out mocking how bad the situation is in China (which is bad, but do you need a degree to understand that people who earn yearly as much as Americans and most of the Europeans earn monthly cannot spent as much in anything as US/EU spends). It's also funny how they don't address some very huge changes in the recording industry, like companies that need studios for something like voice acting have probably mostly found out same as we did when we needed voice acting in one of our projects; It's far more cheaper to hire professional audio engineer and build your own studio than rent them elsewhere (talking about 5 digit sums when renting vs. 4 digit sums initial building and hiring and then there's the possibility to use them in the future). I could also argue many musicians today have home studios for the very same reason, the costs of building your own studio dressing your needs have dropped dramatically in the last 10-15 years thanks to computers and that's also quite a big bite out of the record companies bread and butter.

 

I don't say piracy hasn't affected, because it has affected, but I argue there's a lot of other things that have also affected. Like in the beginning of transformation from physical media to streaming there was downloading which was a hit. I don't have numbers but think about it when you don't need to buy the whole album but you can buy a single track from it like it was a long time before streaming. It's like nobody even wants to talk about how much it costed that the consumers didn't need to buy that 10-20€ CD but they could pay 0,5-1€ for that one song they wanted from that CD. Not to even talk about how much Spotify has eaten margins only because there's only that many time a single person wants to hear one and the same song before it turns boring. Piracy is probably the biggest affector but there must be so many smaller rivers only from technical points that they must have also caused quite a lot effect.

 

Probably only other entertainment area that is as slow to evolve for todays needs is book publishing. I haven't seen so huge and firestone smelling lobbying in a long time that emerged when the city governance of Helsinki was thinking turning secondary schools fully digital, like every single school book publisher was on a battlefield to fight against it because they feared that they would end up ruling that those digital study materials would be implemented openly and collectively instead of ordered from the publishers (and all because today they charge around 20-30€/ upper secondary school book and students must buy them to study, there's some huge belts going around (around 500-700€ per student per year only to the books)).

[Andreas Lilja]

20 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Really glad I don't live in Canada.

Why? It's a proposal from a marginal group. 

 

Makes for great headlines, though.

[mr moose]

7 hours ago, Thaldor said:

At least in Finland there was quite a huge wave of legal battles mostly artists vs. managers and record companies because their contracts were bad (most of the contracts were from 80's and early 90's IIRC). And all started when one artist got a high court ruling that her manager needed to pay her few hunderd tousands euros of royalties that were not paid because contract made in the 80's was something like "XX 000 now and nothing later because all the rights are mine" which went very much against the copyright laws even back in the 80's. And all you get from reading through band biographies (mostly rock and metal bands) is that at some time every and each of them kicked many managers out because they were taking hefty amounts of incomes.

 

 It's funny how all of those threat physical sales as the great golden goose, because it's still the bigest income. Last one even turns out mocking how bad the situation is in China (which is bad, but do you need a degree to understand that people who earn yearly as much as Americans and most of the Europeans earn monthly cannot spent as much in anything as US/EU spends). It's also funny how they don't address some very huge changes in the recording industry, like companies that need studios for something like voice acting have probably mostly found out same as we did when we needed voice acting in one of our projects; It's far more cheaper to hire professional audio engineer and build your own studio than rent them elsewhere (talking about 5 digit sums when renting vs. 4 digit sums initial building and hiring and then there's the possibility to use them in the future). I could also argue many musicians today have home studios for the very same reason, the costs of building your own studio dressing your needs have dropped dramatically in the last 10-15 years thanks to computers and that's also quite a big bite out of the record companies bread and butter.

 

I don't say piracy hasn't affected, because it has affected, but I argue there's a lot of other things that have also affected. Like in the beginning of transformation from physical media to streaming there was downloading which was a hit. I don't have numbers but think about it when you don't need to buy the whole album but you can buy a single track from it like it was a long time before streaming. It's like nobody even wants to talk about how much it costed that the consumers didn't need to buy that 10-20€ CD but they could pay 0,5-1€ for that one song they wanted from that CD. Not to even talk about how much Spotify has eaten margins only because there's only that many time a single person wants to hear one and the same song before it turns boring. Piracy is probably the biggest affector but there must be so many smaller rivers only from technical points that they must have also caused quite a lot effect.

 

Probably only other entertainment area that is as slow to evolve for todays needs is book publishing. I haven't seen so huge and firestone smelling lobbying in a long time that emerged when the city governance of Helsinki was thinking turning secondary schools fully digital, like every single school book publisher was on a battlefield to fight against it because they feared that they would end up ruling that those digital study materials would be implemented openly and collectively instead of ordered from the publishers (and all because today they charge around 20-30€/ upper secondary school book and students must buy them to study, there's some huge belts going around (around 500-700€ per student per year only to the books)).

 

I'll try to address as much of that as I can,  but to put it simply:

 

Lawsuits happen in every industry, we just here about popular people more often.  Maybe Finland had a bad batch of managers.

 

The articles I linked to cite some of the best studies including a peer reviewed meta study (the grand daddy of studies).  They account for most if not all of the things you have mentioned.  They convincingly point to piracy as the problem. Streaming has only really been a thing of recent years (launched in the US in 2011) most of the damage of piracy and the changes we see in the industry as a result happened before 2008 (before nearly all streaming services).  No one talks about the difference between buying a single song and buying a whole album because the artists and respective managers etc get paid pro rata.  They don't earn less from individual sales in fact they earn more.  The issue is that those sales are dropping too.

 

If out of 18 studies only 3 can evidence no effect of piracy while the other 15 evidence effects upto 95% then without counter evidence we have to accept that is the case.   Simply not liking it and assuming they haven't done due diligence on their research is not good enough to refute such data.

 

Here is an article from Harvard talking about the damage that streaming has done recently, this further backs up the conclusions drawn in the previous articles.

 

https://hbr.org/2016/12/how-streaming-is-changing-music-again

[Jito463]

On 10/6/2018 at 5:00 PM, TetraSky said:

If I go by data usage on my single machine (out of 4 other machine/devices on the network), in the last 30 days, Steam used 12GB of data, "System" used 4.32GB, Vivaldi used 67.85GB... I didn't listen to a single song online during that period of time.

I would seriously consider suing/launching a class action lawsuit if we start getting taxed for this shit.

In the last 30 days, Steam has used 123.4GB of data alone out of nearly 170GB of data usage.  I can guarantee that none of that was used to pirate any music or movies, nor did I stream any music or movies.  Heck, Opera used nearly 37GB just from browsing the web and YT videos (a good chunk of them surrounding the Kavanaugh hearing).

 

I'd love to know how this music group came up with the 15GB number.  It's obvious that it has zero basis in reality.  It was either a random, arbitrary number, or they're just completely ignorant about how people use the internet.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

I'd love to know how this music group came up with the 15GB number.  It's obvious that it has zero basis in reality.  It was either a random, arbitrary number, or they're just completely ignorant about how people use the internet.

they likely figured that if the average person uses 50-100G a Month then the difference between that and 15G in taxes would look pretty sweet.

[Jito463]

17 minutes ago, mr moose said:

they likely figured that if the average person uses 50-100G a Month then the difference between that and 15G in taxes would look pretty sweet.

Fair point.  I've long subscribed to the theory that you never attribute to malice what can be equally attributed to stupidity.  However, sometimes - just sometimes - it actually is malice.

[LAwLz]

This reminds me of CopySwede.

According to Swedish law, people are allowed to make copies of things such as videos for private use. If I buy a DVD, I am allowed to make a digital copy of it for certain use. The Swedish movie/music industry did not like this and somehow managed to get a "private copying tax" introduced. Now, whenever a device is sold which could be used to store copies of videos or music, I need to pay a fee which goes to members of the CopySwede organisation.

 

If I buy a hard drive, a smartphone, a memory card, a gaming console, a TV with built in storage, or anything of the sort, I have to pay extra tax and that money goes directly into the pockets of Swedish media companies.

 

 

I think it's horrible and I really hope that this proposal do not pass in Canada, but I would not be all that surprised if it did.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

This reminds me of CopySwede.

According to Swedish law, people are allowed to make copies of things such as videos for private use. If I buy a DVD, I am allowed to make a digital copy of it for certain use. The Swedish movie/music industry did not like this and somehow managed to get a "private copying tax" introduced. Now, whenever a device is sold which could be used to store copies of videos or music, I need to pay a fee which goes to members of the CopySwede organisation.

 

If I buy a hard drive, a smartphone, a memory card, a gaming console, a TV with built in storage, or anything of the sort, I have to pay extra tax and that money goes directly into the pockets of Swedish media companies.

 

 

I think it's horrible and I really hope that this proposal do not pass in Canada, but I would not be all that surprised if it did.

That's just fucked.  How does that happen outside the US?

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

This reminds me of CopySwede.

According to Swedish law, people are allowed to make copies of things such as videos for private use. If I buy a DVD, I am allowed to make a digital copy of it for certain use. The Swedish movie/music industry did not like this and somehow managed to get a "private copying tax" introduced. Now, whenever a device is sold which could be used to store copies of videos or music, I need to pay a fee which goes to members of the CopySwede organisation.

 

If I buy a hard drive, a smartphone, a memory card, a gaming console, a TV with built in storage, or anything of the sort, I have to pay extra tax and that money goes directly into the pockets of Swedish media companies.

 

 

I think it's horrible and I really hope that this proposal do not pass in Canada, but I would not be all that surprised if it did.

Same thing here on the other side of the baltic sea. Was called kasettimaksu/hyvitysmaksu but we dropped it in 2015 and replaced it with a payment from government budget (taxes). Reason for dropping it was quite clear, most of the people who needed empty CDs/DVDs bought them from Germany and it when HDDs were added under it the sales of HDDs just died in Finland because they were also bought from other countries and that way government lost more sales taxes than it would loose from directly paying those sums from the budget.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, Thaldor said:

Same thing here on the other side of the baltic sea. Was called kasettimaksu/hyvitysmaksu but we dropped it in 2015 and replaced it with a payment from government budget (taxes). Reason for dropping it was quite clear, most of the people who needed empty CDs/DVDs bought them from Germany and it when HDDs were added under it the sales of HDDs just died in Finland because they were also bought from other countries and that way government lost more sales taxes than it would loose from directly paying those sums from the budget.

Now that is an amusing turn around for a government.  Forethought would have told them it was a bad idea from the beginning while a US government would have just tariffed the imports instead.

[Thaldor]

37 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Now that is an amusing turn around for a government.  Forethought would have told them it was a bad idea from the beginning while a US government would have just tariffed the imports instead.

That's the great side of EU. As long as you buy from EU there's no tariffs. Also those private copying levys were originally put in place in the 1984 where the original name comes from (kasettimaksu = casette fee) because it was collected from empty C- and VHS-casettes. Very dated stuff and there really wasn't anything else the government could do without breaking agreements with EU. Quite the same as now with alcohol, government can't really do anything about people ordering beverages from Germany and Latvia through internet and "manage shipping by themselves" (it's not illegal to order but if the seller manages shipping they must pay alcohol taxes to Finland, but if the customer manages the shipping then there's nothing) or just take a vacation in Estonia or Latvia and bring a car full of beverages for their own consumption (example 24-pack of beer costs around 20-25€ in Finland and you get the exact same pack from Estonia for 15€ and even cheaper from Latvia, it starts to become very profitable to take few days off and go to a roadtrip (at the height of the "booze rally" people took their cars with them for cruises to Estonia and teh ship company drove the cars out of the ship, loaded ordered beverages to the car and drove it back to the ship and it wasn't that rare to rent a van for a trip to Estonia).

[wolfsbane3083]

Dayum. I use over 1TB a month. Just downloading game can cost you a good 100GB+ these days.

[Jito463]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

How does that happen outside the US?

Because the US isn't the monster of the world?  Because every government has idiots?  Take your pick, or I have plenty more quips to choose from.

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, Thaldor said:

That's the great side of EU. As long as you buy from EU there's no tariffs. Also those private copying levys were originally put in place in the 1984 where the original name comes from (kasettimaksu = casette fee) because it was collected from empty C- and VHS-casettes. Very dated stuff and there really wasn't anything else the government could do without breaking agreements with EU. Quite the same as now with alcohol, government can't really do anything about people ordering beverages from Germany and Latvia through internet and "manage shipping by themselves" (it's not illegal to order but if the seller manages shipping they must pay alcohol taxes to Finland, but if the customer manages the shipping then there's nothing) or just take a vacation in Estonia or Latvia and bring a car full of beverages for their own consumption (example 24-pack of beer costs around 20-25€ in Finland and you get the exact same pack from Estonia for 15€ and even cheaper from Latvia, it starts to become very profitable to take few days off and go to a roadtrip (at the height of the "booze rally" people took their cars with them for cruises to Estonia and teh ship company drove the cars out of the ship, loaded ordered beverages to the car and drove it back to the ship and it wasn't that rare to rent a van for a trip to Estonia).

Modern day rum running.

[mr moose]

7 hours ago, Jito463 said:

Because the US isn't the monster of the world?  Because every government has idiots?  Take your pick, or I have plenty more quips to choose from.

Sorry I was being facetious,   It's just that of all the issues you guys have had with the internet and monopolies in a juxtaposition against other countries, particular smaller ones like sweden, it genuinely surprised me to see a law so anti consumer get passed outside the US.  Maybe I am a bit Naive, but then maybe the US is over represented in such issues.

[Jito463]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

Sorry I was being facetious,

Gotcha, text doesn't always convey meaning as well as we'd like.

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

It's just that of all the issues you guys have had with the internet and monopolies in a juxtaposition against other countries

Honestly, most of the issues come down to local city/county/state government not doing their jobs properly, and permitting these internet monopolies to thrive.

3 minutes ago, mr moose said:

it genuinely surprised me to see a law so anti consumer get passed outside the US.  Maybe I am a bit Naive, but then maybe the US is over represented in such issues.

There's plenty of laws I've heard of from other countries, that just have me scratching my head in confusion or holding my head in agony over the sheer stupidity of them.  That's why I say, there's idiots in every government.

 

I think it's natures way of trying to give an advantage to the intellectually challenged, much to the chagrin of the rest of us.

[RejZoR]

Everyone wants to sell us 100000 Gigazillionbyte connections, but cap us at 15GB per month. Which is ridiculous. My phone plan for 10€ has 20GB of data. Having anything less than unlimited on my landline at 100Mbps would be legalized theft.

[Maslofski]

lol so if i download a 60$ game im not compensating EA properly now

[dalekphalm]

3 minutes ago, Maslofski said:

lol so if i download a 60$ game im not compensating EA properly now

Actually, according to the CMG (Canadian Music Group), you'd not be compensating Canadian Musicians enough... even if the game had no Canadian music in it...