Are eye eh eh

[greatbear]

Well, it seems the music industry thinks it can shake down our Canadian friends upstairs a hell of a lot more than they are doing already. For years, Canadians have 'enjoyed' paying a 21 cent 'tax' (actually a 'levy') on each blank CD-R disk purchased, whether or not that disk is used to store music. Disks designed to store music data ("Music CD-Rs" and MiniDiscs) carry a 77 cent tariff. That's about to change, and expand, if a proposal by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) becomes law. In addition to raising the current tariffs, the new law would attach a hefty levy to flash media according to capacity, and some whopping fees onto MP3 players, topping out at $75 bux for a player with 30 gigs or more of storage.



As far as I see it, this 'levy', which is meant to compensate artists for their work (and to date I think has not contributed one red cent to anyone but industry lawyers) should now give carte blanche to everyone up in the Great White North to download, trade and share music via any means possible with full blessings of the industry. Artists be damned, go forth and fill those iPods up. After all it was Universal Media Group CEO Doug Morris who exclaimed last year, "These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it.". Makes you just want to give up buying music forever, doesnt it?

More info can be found here.
Proposal can be viewed here (.pdf)

Comments

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Can't agree with you more.

After reading some of the articles that Janis Ian has written about the recording industry, the idea of them claiming the moral high ground makes me want to hurl. If I thought buying music through them would actually put money in the pockets of any artist other than ones with enough marketing clout to force something resembling a decent share, I would - but I no longer do.

Buying direct from an artist's website (such as lynnemusic.com) or from a company like CDBaby where my understanding is that the artist gets a substantial cut of the price paid by the customer are far superior options, IMHO. I want artists paid for their creativity and hard work; I don't want to feed a bloated bureaucracy whose only justification for existing is to persecute their own customer base.

Now that non-DRMed music is being sold throuh iTMS - at a premium, though admittedly also at a higher bitrate - I think the recording industry needs to stop throwing rocks at a service like AllOfMP3.com/AllTunes.com and realize the value they represent in terms of freedom of codec/bitrate choice and reasonable pricing.

I won't even go into the crap they pull by claiming shared music is "stolen" when they refuse to reissue those out-of-print recordings because they "aren't economically viable."

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

The labels are sitting on a goldmine, and they just cant see it for their fat heads and big asses. It would take the tiniest of investment to make available so much out of print stuff, and people would snap it up. Even if a track sold at most a hundred copies, it would be almost pure profit. Add up the countless thousands of these 'long tail' tracks and you are talking a fortune. Problem is, though, one of the reasons these old tracks "aren't economically viable" is that they would undoubtedly undercut sales of the latest, poor excuse for 'music' the big labels are pushing. They want return on investment for the new shit they hope brings in millions. People would head to the past for all those good, but often forgotten songs.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Yup. There's no longer any excuse for ANYTHING to ever go out of print. Granted, some albums I never expected to see on CD have come out - witness this comment's icon - but as you say there's a HUGE amount of material that's never been released on CD - and for that matter, there's material that HAS come out on CD and subsequently gone out of print.