I dunno. These things really do help artists.
Well, they might help artists and such, but it's a very broad and pointless tax. If it was just music storage and playing devices, then maybe, MAYBE, it would be borderline acceptable.
Originally, it was. It was on things like blank cassettes, recordable MiniDiscs and DAT tapes, etc. (And these levies are also why audio CD recorders demand "audio CD-Rs", which are nothing more than regular CD-Rs with an added flag in the ATIP to tell the recorder "I'm licensed for audio use". Countries would then charge the levy on audio CD-Rs, but not on data ones that the audio recorders would reject.)
Then the MP3 became popular, and suddenly nearly
every data storage device was being used for music storage, from the hard disks in computers, to flash memory cards, to data CD-Rs.
But a tax that targets general purpose storage, general purpose computing, basically devices that will probably never have anything to do with illegal piracy is just silly. It assumes guilt by default on the consumer side and is not exactly transparent.
Well, the thing is, we all know that music piracy was (and remains) a common use for computers and our gadgets.
But remember that the point of such levies is to legally change it from "piracy" to "remunerated fair use". (These levies originated in the days of mix tapes, I believe. In USA for example, making a mix tape for yourself is legal, but making one for a friend is not, because the friend doesn't own a license to the music. In countries with a levy, it's legal to give a friend a mix tape under such fair use. You just can't sell it, beyond the cost of the blank tape.)
Anyhow, here in Switzerland for example, they originally
did charge different levies depending on the data storage medium type, to account for its likelihood to hold music. At the time, MP3 players tended to be Flash based, so memory cards were levied at a higher rate than hard disks. But technological changes ended up blurring the lines, resulting in bizarro-world situations like the levy on an 8GB iPod nano (which uses Flash storage) being double what it was for a 500GB hard disk, for example, and far higher than that of a hard-disk based 80GB iPod Classic, which definitely
was for music! So eventually, they just lowered the levy overall, because storage sizes were growing at a far larger pace than people's music libraries. I don't know what the levy is now to be honest, but it's not much.
Also, I feel kinda dirty due to the fact that a part of my money that I used to buy a new FLASH drive went to finance further screeching from the local Justin Bieber equivalent.
Not only the local Bieber equivalent, but the original Biebs, too!! :p
I suspect that in the long run, media levies will go the way of the dodo, as streaming subscriptions take over and people stop buying music outright.