Spotify starts divesting from France in response to new music-streaming tax

"Protect their culture" is one of those phrases that raises alarm bells, especially when it's being used by a government. We have a 1st Amendment for a reason - because governments are not to be trusted with the decisions of what cultures to protect or not. In the specific case of France, all sorts of horrible shit was done in the name of """protecting""" their culture. There were several other languages[0] native to France that Francophones had themselves tried to wipe out[1]. French is not a language in need of protection, it is a brutal predator in and of itself. If English weren't there to keep it in check[2], it'd go eat all the rest of the languages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patois

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language#Preservation

[2] Similar to the concept of a keystone predator, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species

When I visited Paris, the expectation to (at least try to) speak French and the national pride felt like looking at a certain version of the US from the outside.

They basically killed off all the other minority languages they had in their country (like oxitan) and homogenised on standard French. Some irony in that.

Citation needed. /s

They just spam Bieber, Celine Dion, and Drake to make those numbers instead of sampling smaller acts.

Every time you figure out an obstacle - an obscure regulation that affects you and how to beat it, which bureaucrat can assist you in these matters, which politician you can affiliate with to make red tape get cut - you are also creating a moat. Even better, if you get competitors, you can speak to your government contacts and get your competitor mired in the same red tape.

While you personally may be able to overcome this, the net result across the macro economy is one of stagnation and slow growth. It does not encourage innovation. Such is the situation in France.

And France has the highest government expenditure as a percent of GDP among the developed world, at >58% as of last count[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

This is more or less true for whole of Europe. A look at historical GDP growth gives a big hint - around before 2010 the EU and USA were on par, after that while the US grew and innovated Europe has chosen bureaucracy, taxation and fighting with business aside from the state owned ones.

Better than going to your existing Big Tech management and shareholders. France is supporting "Buy Local" at nation state scale. When the US "grows and innovates," it's mostly extraction at scale for shareholder benefit. Railroads (precision scheduling), healthcare, finance (credit card rails 3% economy rake, financialization of all the things), shareholder investor owned utilities, tax prep, etc.

It's always nice to see a country push back on the tech/intellectual property equivalent of the East India Company concept. Colonialism and empire building isn't dead, it simply expresses itself as multinationals on top of capital markets in the current incarnation. Don't invite the vampire in. When someone says "GDP" or "growth," politely ask them to show whom is benefiting (and to what degree) from numbers championed from a spreadsheet.

(i am sympathetic to the plight of your run of the mill, well intentioned startup founder focused on problem solving, but also not blind to the bulldozers I mention above)

The CEO of Deezer does not seem to count the tax as a win.

> Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira called the tax “the worst possible outcome of all the different scenarios” the company faced from the French government. “Adding taxes is the worst way of trying to support the industry,” he told Billboard.

https://www.billboard.com/pro/deezer-stock-down-france-tax-s...

I thought that was apple and pandora?

I’m sure the corpos that it hurt are grateful, but who cares from the consumer or artists side?

Piracy is a costing problem and Spotify’s solution is “keep costs to the consumer low and money in our pockets by keeping it out of the artists’ hands”. Piracy was also the leverage they originally had on the labels (better to collect 5 cents than nothing, right?) before network effect and inertia took over.

They didn’t kill piracy, they co-opted it.

If only the UX wasn't god awful shitgarbage. It manages to be underfeatured and obscure and just plain annoying (can I please see all music by the artist?) at the same time. A friend told me that UX designers he used to work with used to mock Spotify and took it as an example for how not to do things.

A private collection and a player like Clementine is so much nicer. It's not like Spotify has everything, anyway. Not even original versions of songs if anyone released an arbitrarily bad remaster.

99c on iTunes and later streaming on Groveshark killed mp3 sharing.

Spotify cleaned up the legalities of it, but they weren't (and still are not) innovating.

I’d bet that is not true. I grew up with Napster, Kazaa, Soulseek, Limewire and friends and they allowed me to find so many fantastic musicians and helped start to shape my tastes in music. When I was older and had a job, I supported many of these musicians by buying their albums (and much less frequently, going to one of their concerts).

The thing about art, IMO, is that it does a great service for humanity in giving us hope, purpose, and something to live for. When you treat artists as a cost to just minimize, you make it harder for any of them to succeed at making a living doing their work. I believe that the effects of the very low streaming royalty payments will have a chilling effect on professional musicians making a real go of it.