it is my understanding that this system is in place in the EU and music has not vanished there.
Apples and oranges. First, the concept of "owning" a transmitter is not as common in Europe as it is in the states. Here, you apply for and own a given facility at X height, Y watts and Z location, etc etc etc. In Europe, partly because of a tradition of more government and partly because of geography lending itself to the situation, you tend to see a cluster of facilities, all with roughly equal specs and coverage, and the people "running the station" are providing content but they have little say over the height, wattage and location of their transmission facility. This means you tend to see a lot more state-run media in Europe. The Radio France building in Paris originates, IIRC, either 1/3rd of
all radio & TV broadcast in the
entire country of France.
The point is that with a state-run enterprise, there's less concern about complying with a rule like the "performance tax", you just add the cost to the budget and keep right on going. This is especially true in Europe where there is, in general, higher personal tax rates (although the corporate tax rate is actually much lower, in general, than in the US) and more acceptance of government having an active role in various parts of peoples' lives. Often the populace is demanding that the government INCREASE funding to various gov't agencies so they can do their jobs better. It's just very different on the other side of the pond, so to speak.
With a private enterprise, of course, it's the opposite: adding any additional cost runs the strong risk of decreased profits...and thus is automatically "bad" in the eyes of the enterprise. Given the precarious fiscal health of both the broadcasting and music enterprises, I'm not surprised both sides are fighting so viciously over this issue.
Another point worth considering is that the overall philosophy you see in Europe also means that you don't see "college" or "community" radio or TV over there like you do in the US. There's no point; the state-run radio fulfills that programming mission of serving niche audiences. And while the NAB doesn't really care about college radio, that is what the Performance Tax will be most damaging to. Not because of the costs; the fees are actually quite minimal for comparatively low-budget operations like college/community radio. It's the RECORDKEEPING that's deadly. Most commercial radio plays media off hard drives using comprehensive automation systems and thus it's not terribly hard to log everything. College/community radio typically plays music from a variety of sources off a variety of media, and they rely heavily on multiple unpaid volunteers with little or no professional supervision. That's a nigh-impossible environment to get consistent and accurate program logs from.
Besides the damage to non-comm radio that the "Performance Tax" would cause, I oppose it on the basic premise that the music industry is losing money due to a thoroughly broken business model, and they're trying to ride the eagle just a little longer by turning on the one industry that has made their business model work at all for decades: broadcasting. In other words, they're cannibalizing themselves to keep the cash flowing for just a few more years before it all comes crashing down...and they don't care that they'll destroy the broadcasting industry in the process.
Mind you, it's not like the broadcasting industry isn't really self-destructive, too....
