Don’t forget that the $25k wouldn’t all be gains in the first place. If the investment had increased in value by 25%, it would be 20k base and only 5k gains; if it had increased by 100% it would be an even split. We’re talking about taxing a part of a part of the sale value.
With the introduction of the stand-alone audiobooks offering, Spotify is now able to pay lower music-licensing rates for the music-and-audiobook bundle, introduced in the U.S. in November 2023. The 2022 settlement agreement between the National Music Publishers Assn. and streaming services includes a carveout for bundles (such as Amazon Prime and Apple Music + Apple News), which the new audiobook offering falls under. Such plans lower the mechanical licensing rates the company pays in the U.S. Spotify’s lower royalty rates are retroactive to March 1, 2024.
However, NMPA president-CEO David Israelite had strong words for the move when contacted for comment by Variety. “It appears Spotify has returned to attacking the very songwriters who make its business possible,” he wrote. “Spotify’s attempt to radically reduce songwriter payments by reclassifying their music service as an audiobook bundle is a cynical, and potentially unlawful, move that ends our period of relative peace. We will not stand for their perversion of the settlement we agreed upon in 2022 and are looking at all options.” The NMPA and streaming services resolved a years-long standoff over royalty rates with a Copyright Royalty Board ruling in 2022, and agreed upon a new rate of 15.35% for the 2023-2027 period.
The standard fine for violating the STOCK Act is $200, but frequently the House Committee on Ethics and the Senate Select Committee on Ethics waive the fee.
Craig Holman, a Capitol Hill lobbyist on ethics and campaign finance rules for nonprofit Public Citizen, said the fee is one of two reasons why the STOCK Act is frequently violated.
“The penalty is so minimal that these millionaire members of Congress really don’t care about it," Holman told Raw Story. “The second provision is the ethics committees are not really enforcing it or taking it seriously.”
Customers who go through self-checkout must use the device to scan their receipt’s barcode — confirming that they paid something — which opens a metal gate, letting them leave.
How is that supposed to help at all in stopping theft? “Oh, you paid for something, you definitely aren’t leaving with anything you didn’t pay for.” I can’t see a way “organized crime” could possibly work around that. /s
At this point there are people in their forties who had access to online porn as minors. Have any actual studies been done to show that a significant portion of the many, many people who’ve grown up in the last 20-30 years have been harmed by having access to online porn while they were younger, or are these laws just something that’s trendy at the moment?
“The source of this is a dividend policy that has really become out of whack,” added Horan.
BCE will now pay a quarterly dividend of 99.75 cents per common share, up from 96.75 cents per share, the company said Thursday. Dividends are a portion of earnings that companies pay out to their shareholders, usually every quarter.
"Typically, the companies pay about 50 per cent of their earnings in dividends, and they’re up to about 130 per cent right now of their earnings. So I think that’s pressuring the company to produce more free cash flow."
It’s technically a Canadian Press article, but the CTV copy linked here yesterday didn’t have that part.
A good reason would have been potential “synergies” with Harmonix, which they also own, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything about that. Collaboration between the company that sells music and the company that makes music games seems like a no-brainer to me.