Related Trivia : France stands out as one of the select countries that enforce a music quota system, which appears to be among the most stringent : a minimum of four in ten songs broadcast by domestic radio stations to be in the French language [1]. (link : it is this same french music that will be further supported by the new Tax)
I quite like how France defend their culture. Some of these rules sound silly, but if they slow down the world homogenising then they aren’t without benefit.
"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.
Strongly agree. If people want to listen to non-French songs to the point where the government needs to legislate a minimum, who is actually benefiting?
Domestic artists whose music is otherwise insufficiently supported by the local industry and who would risk being totally crowded out in favour of blasting the new Doja Cat at the expense of ever airing anything unfamiliar.
So, while music diversity on the radio is a problem, it is not a problem unique to France or even foreign language music overall. Nor do language quotas solve it. I imagine it winds up being the same as CanCon, where it doesn't so much improve the diversity of songs on the radio as much as it gives Nickelback lots of playtime.
Language quotas are not meant to be the solution, they're meant to be part of the solution. Canada is a completely different scenario given its proximity and relationship to the US. Speaking as a former music journalist in a country with domestic music quotas of varying degrees, I can tell you these things help.
You're not looking far back enough. European anti-Americanism is a monarchist meme that jumped from ideological host to ideological host until it thoroughly infected the whole continent[0].
America won its independence primarily by playing colonial powers off one another. Britain bankrupted itself defending America from the French. When Britain tried to get America to pay for being protected, America got France to bankrupt itself protecting America from the tax bill. France then had a revolution; its medieval despots replaced with liberals and left-wingers caught in a power struggle and demanding bribes of the American diplomats[1]. The rest of Europe's power elite distrusted America, as it had apparently infected France with liberal republicanism[2], and France was busy invading the rest of Europe[3] and spreading liberalism[4] elsewhere.
Monarchism was, if not defeated, at least contained with constitutional restrictions. However, other ideologies found it useful to define themselves in opposition to America. America has always been a country of contradictions. We're the liberal democracy that had to come up with a "three fifths compromise", after all. So if you're on the right[5], America is dangerously radical. If you're on the left, America is dangerously conservative. If you're a centrist, America is dangerously fickle.
I will give the "culture protectors" one thing. America's quasi-official policy has been to make it very easy to export American culture while making it very difficult to import it. This is difficult to actually enforce, however, because we have the 1st Amendment. The US government can't just ban or put quotas on French films or music in the same way that France can. In the broadcast era of publishing, America got their way primarily through public-private partnerships. It had a movie industry that it sponsored with favorable trading relations and copyright laws, while looking the other way on monopolistic policies that would shut foreign cinema out of the market. But that's all gone now - as can be evidenced by the ridiculous amount of fandom for Japanese animation and Korean music - and doesn't excuse the far more explicit legal limitations on cultural importation that France engages in.
[0] Arguably with the exception of fascists, which fucking adored America's extreme racial segregation even while it attacked America for being liberal.
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.
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.
It seems that fears of music homogenization are overblown, if you check charts on streaming services for different countries (non-english speaking) they would mostly have local music, even for the countries where there are no laws protecting local music. Many of them would have no US/UK artists in top-20 (most Latin American, East European, African countries)
In France you do (with interrogation and exclamation marks as well), but not everywhere in the world. I don't think anyone would raise an eyebrow at punctuation without the leading space in a french-speaking text.
“Spotify will have the means to absorb this tax, but Spotify will disinvest in France and will invest in other markets,” Monin said in an interview with FranceInfo last week. “France does not encourage innovation and investment.”
What will the CNM (Centre National de la Musique) do? Could it be encouraging “innovation and investment” in France? While Spotify loses some profit and share price, but then may have to innovate and invest in this new business environment.
No, in general. It's a tax hell, the state is capturing about 43.5% of GDP for very questionable results on every plan (security, education, health, etc.) The money will be diverted to friends of friends that don't need it in the first place.
Source: myself, looking at starting a company there.
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)
Very serious. It is an opinion that it is no added value. Show me evidence that the French government is providing a lower quality of life than say, the US government. GDP and growth are poor measures of quality of life. Certainly, you are free to not participate in the market if you choose not to as a business owner or service provider. It is very likely nothing of value will be lost.
Spotify's CEO is worth ~$3B while artists make pennies. Why would you incentivize such a structure unless your mental model tilts towards that being acceptable? I'm not saying this should be free or a utility, but it should probably be a business of a couple hundred people with a reasonable valuation target. As a nation state, you can say no. Europe does this, China does this. It can be done. "I would like to submit a bug report." The only people wringing their hands are those who would profit from the VC/tech fuckery ecosystem extending its reach. Don't let them; cut them tentacles seeking a moat/regulatory capture/entrenchment right off.
We can do better, and I feel no shame in stating such a position.
Almost all the links you provided show USA having a higher quality of life than France in almost every way. For instance the first link of the google search (at least for me) was
shows USA as having in some ways having dramatically higher quality of life metrics, and minimally lacking only in a couple of ways.
I think it's sad because the problems France has could easily be fixed by liberalizing and minimizing the economics. But the french people are extremely against that and so it will practically not happen. And France is rich enough due to historical reasons that it'll probably never be compelled to do so.
Of course, USA should really be compared with EU, not a state like France. Comparing individual US states to France would be more accurate. Unfortunately, such metrics aren't usually available since USA is always considered a single entity in these reports.
> Spotify's CEO is worth ~$3B while artists make pennies.
That sounds like the market signaling an underproduction of streaming services and an overproduction of musicians. A levy on streaming services earmarked for French artists pushes the market further into disequilibrium, giving people less of what they want and more of what they don’t want.
Not so much about artist comp going up as it is about driving down comp and valuations for these "tech" companies who attempt to use leverage to get their way.
It's about power. Always was, always is (once you're passed a certain fiat amount; only so much "line goes up" before it no longer matters). As Theodore Roosevelt said about highest tax bracket taxpayers who might leave the country, "we wish them well!" Call the bluff of these people, they're the ones with something to lose. If they push too hard, make them lose.
The rules are flexible, all of this (economic systems) is a shared delusion. Be mindful of this when negotiating and operating within the system.
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.
Interestingly, some of those moves by the EU (like the GDPR) are widely popular with citizens around the world, to the point where some US jurisdictions have been working on their own copies.
So perhaps there is worthwhile innovation happening in the EU after all?
“Innovation” is tech-man speak for “figuring out how to privatize/shift profits to our company” in the press. Sort of like how “the economy” can usually just be translated to mean “rich people’s yacht money”
> “the economy” can usually just be translated to mean “rich people’s yacht money”
Mississippi, one of the poorest US states and one widely panned for having "backwards" economic policies (meaning low levels of redistributive taxation), has a higher median household income at nearly $53k[0] than Germany, the country with the best economy in egalitarian Europe, at roughly $46k[1]. So it's definitely not just yacht-owners that are the beneficiaries of economic growth in a laissez-faire capitalistic country.
SO sorry that it took me so long to respond to this, but your math felt wrong, so I looked into it.
[1]Mississippi PER CAPITA income: 29K
[2]Worst German State PER CAPITA income: 34K
I have no idea what All About Berln is, and when I looked into their dataset it was...confusing. So I went to Wikipedia. I think you were comparing Household vs Per capita?
Either way, Mississippi isn't the doing as well you're claiming. They also have a 19% poverty rate [1] compared to Germany's 11% [3].
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.
(1) The music industry? (2) Working musicians who make contemporary music people want to listen to? (3) Paying to maintain a big classical music hall that people think other people should listen to? (4) (3) only if they play Debussy instead of Bach?
Those end of year recaps are a highlight for me. I really look forward to it every year, along with comparing against my friends.
They also have a really nice API, which has admittedly been getting more and more locked down, but to claim it was not innovative, especially at the time, is farcical. All this without even mentioning, as other posters have, their effect on legitimizing music streaming. Also, and each user has anecdotally different experiences here, their music recommendations for me are top notch. I've discovered just so, so many pieces of great music through their service.
From my perspective they made streaming a vast catalogue of music legally a business. I’ve been a user for a long time and been able to discover a lot on their platform although I must admit quality of recommendations seems to be falling lately. Last.fm was great at that
I used to pirate everything and then Spotify came along, since Spotify I have not pirated once. I’ve used it almost every day for over 10 years. I listen to much more diverse music now. This experience is commonplace. I would say completely changing how a generation consumes music is innovative.
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.
Back when they were in the “acquire users” phase (when all of this innovation was happening) the UX was much better. Now they have acquired users and are in the “exctract value” stage it’s all going to hell ;(
Pandora was an alternative to radio, not to pirating music, and Apple probably contributed more to music piracy than any other company. Nobody was filling their iPods to the brim with $0.99 songs, they were filling them up with pirated songs that they imported into iTunes.
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.
> I’m sure the corpos that it hurt are grateful, but who cares from the consumer or artists side?
The reason Spotify was able to out-compete piracy (which is ostensibly free) is because it provided a substantially better experience to users. I’m sure the artists don’t get a great deal out of it, but it seems weird to blame that on streaming. Artists losing out to big business has been the entire model of the music industry since forever.
In any case, even if you think Spotify is fundamentally evil, and their innovations are extremely harmful, that doesn’t take anything away from how innovative they were. Which is very, very innovative. They completely changed the whole music industry world wide.
> They didn’t kill piracy, they co-opted it.
Trying to claim that one company licensing a music catalog, and then selling it to consumers is “piracy” is a terrible take, and just makes you look like you have some weird and extreme views on this topic.
You might think this if you listen to mostly pop music, but I remember the day of having to find pirated uploads on YouTube or pirate the music myself just to listen to music that wasn't from a major label. There was grooveshark but that was pirated music.
Spotify was the first streaming service to let you listen to any type of music from any place in the world. The only place to do that before them was YouTube but this was before you could listen to YouTube videos in audio format.
Spotify has best in class discoverability with generative playlists and recommendations for any type of music. You can find Spotify generative playlist for the most niche music genres.
I uploaded a single electronic music track on Spotify 10 years ago without using a label or advertising it other than to a few friends on FB and it has 100k plays. The same song on YouTube has a few 100 plays.
Again if you just use Spotify to listen to popular music then yeah it will definitely feel like it not much compared to anything else, but if you listen to a lot of music and different types of music there is no match to Spotify.
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.
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.
I'm not sure it works out that way in practice. I use YouTube Music primarily, and I used to buy music from Google Play on occasion, but since they've gone all in on streaming, I can't even purchase lossless audio from them anymore.
These big platforms always threaten to “pull out” of markets when regulated. Facebook has pulled the same shenanigans over paying publishers and so on.
I think we should take them up on it. There are many alternatives.
looks like the increased cost is not worth the profit. simple mathematics. capitalism is nature and you cannot fight the nature because sooner or later something gives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_quota#France