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I'm not trying to convince anyone here, just to explain. Tax on tapes was introduced to compensate singers/songwriters for the copying between friends (remember the dual cassette deck? ), selling the tapes was illegal (no craigslist in those days), so an already small market wouldn't shrink beyond sustainability. In my country musicians were compensated through radio play (called STIM), the tape tax was distributed according to how often a song was played on the radio, this was facilitated by having a national public radio, writers were compensated in the same manner based on library lending. Since nobody buys cassette tapes anymore, the Italian proposal makes sense where this tradition has been established for some 40 years (I believe). Shifting the tax from tapes to downloading it's as natural as going from paperbacks to e-books.
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