Canada dabbled in an MP3 player tax, but ultimately abandoned it. Now the labels are trying their luck in Japan,
where a government committee is
sitting on a request to place a
two-percent levy on portable MP3 player sales. The idea is that iPods represent today's blank media; the music industry
has succeeded in claiming a small percentage of some blank-media sales in the U.S.
The reasoning of such taxes is that recordable media and devices displace CD sales. The truth is that nobody really
knows whether home recording displaces or augments CD sales, just as nobody really knows the effect of file-sharing.
It's foolish to think that ripping a CD for the iPod displaces a hypothetical second CD purchase. In this case, the
iPod displaces the purchase of a CD Walkman. Under no realistic scenario does a playback device displace the purchase
of a second identical CD. The labels really are claiming displacement via ripping and giving away home copies, and
trying to make MP3 players complicit in that transaction. That's dubious logic at best, but if it were true then the
labels would claim levies on computers, PDAs, cell phones, and any other device that can store and play back a music
file. Over the weekend I took home an LG VX8100 cell
phone, and plan to use it as an out-and-about MP3 player. It will carry my home copies, and perhaps some files I
receive from friends. How can the labels make a few pennies off the files in my pocket, and how can they rationalize
that a CD sale has been lost?
There's another angle to all this. The labels are furious at Apple's success, and—even uglier—they are greedy for a
piece of Apple's pie. The labels want Apple to
charge more in iTMS so the labels can profit from the iPod tie-in. And in Japan, where iTMS has taken off like a rocket
despite the petulant non-participation of Sony and Warner, the labels evidently want to punish consumers (and Apple)
for buying and selling music without them. Get a freakin' life, losers.
