Canada Sets Tax On Legal Downloads OTTAWA -- October 19, 2007: Apple's iTunes Music Store and other services that sell legal music downloads in Canada will now be paying a tax of 3 cents per downloaded song, or 1.5 cents per track for album downloads. The taxes are retroactive to 1996, back when the earliest digital music pirates were still trading tunes over FTP servers.
Personalized Internet radio services like Pandora, Slacker and CBS Corp.'s Last.fm will now pay 6.8 percent of their monthly subscription fees in tax, with a minimum of 43 cents per month per subscriber. The Copyright Board's decision on other Internet-radio rates is still pending.
The Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada has been pushing for the tax since '96.
