“No to the streaming tax.
Anti-rap tax.
Racist tax.
Tax not justified.
Popular rapper Niska's message to his estimated 5.3 million followers on Twitter and Instagram, picked up by other heavyweights and hip-hop outlets, is causing a stir.
This is the visible part of a controversy that has divided the music industry since this summer around a future tax aimed at financing the National Center for Music (CNM), the equivalent of the CNC for cinema, a public establishment. responsible for supporting the entire sector: artists, show producers and record stores.
❌❌❌ @RimaAbdulMalak pic.twitter.com/A42Emrlfy0
— NISKA 🦅 (@Niska_Officiel) October 4, 2022
Launched in 2020 with an annual budget of 50 million euros, the CNM saw its expenses explode with aid linked to Covid-19 while, in the “revenue” column, the main tax on ticketing brings in less than before, due to the decline in attendance in performance halls.
The annual yield of the platforms in France?
21 million euros
To find new income, the Center and its guardianship, the Ministry of Culture, are considering a new tax of 1.5% on all income from paid subscriptions on platforms, the main ones of which are in France Deezer , Spotify and Apple Music.
For an annual return estimated at 21 million euros.
“It is not a question of financing the CNM, which is in no way threatened, specifies its president, Jean-Philippe Thiellay, but missions of diversity, ecological transition, innovation, international development and equality. men women.
On these missions, there is not, as in live performance, a system where the downstream finances the upstream, where listening to music contributes to the financing.
This is a real subject because we will have a problem of financing these missions from 2024, but this agitation relates to amendments which are not pushed by the government but by opposition deputies (six elected from Nupes) and which were rejected on Friday.
As we speak, there is therefore no streaming tax.
The Ministry of Culture has also put nothing in the 2023 Finance Law Plan, because it is not ready,
it's not ripe.
We're all going to sit around a table to talk about it.
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Why does Niska castigate an anti-rap tax?
Because it is the most listened to music in France, especially on streaming platforms, and it would therefore be the first contributor to this tax while hip-hop is not represented in the governing bodies of the CNM.
“Accusing us of racism is hurtful”
“It's a biased shortcut to say that it would be an anti-rap tax, first believes its president, Jean-Philippe Thiellay.
Of the top 10,000 plays, this genre represents a quarter, no more.
And to say that the CNM does not like rap is false.
And accusing us of racism is hurtful.
On the contrary, it is the musical aesthetic that we help the most for the live, the disc, the clips, the tax credit, and the second that we receive in training… ”
The SNEP (national union of phonographic publishing), which brings together record companies and platforms, is against a tax on streaming, which today represents 70% of revenue from recorded music in France.
“After fifteen years of record crisis, and while we are going up the slope, it would be a very bad decision, believes the general manager of SNEP, Alexandre Lash.
We must not break the dynamic of streaming.
If we put this tax in place, subscription prices could increase and drive consumers away.
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The SNEP has proposed other avenues of funding to the CNM.
“We have been defending the idea of a contribution to the manufacture and sale of audio equipment from the start,” explains Alexandre Lash.
On my AirPods, for example, nothing comes back to music creation.
To our knowledge, these are the only actors who benefit from creation without paying.
We can also adjust a tax that already exists: the TSV, tax on video services.
For the moment only benefits the CNC and YouTube.
Networks like TikTok and Facebook, which are free, do not pay us enough… 50% of the time spent listening to music online is done on video services and this only generates 10% of the income of producers and therefore artists .
It is better to involve these actors rather than those who are already virtuous and already pay 70% of their income to rights holders.
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