I am really tired of the entertainment industry here in the US. I realized it this weekend but I need to step back a few years to give you a better picture of where I stood then and where I stand now.
When DVD players first came out I bought one right away. I knew instantly that this was going to be the wave of the future of home movies. I bought Toshiba's first player and it was amazing. I soon fell in love with the entire home theater idea and started piecing together components as fast as my wallet would let me.
Over the next couple of years, I would continue to upgrade my existing hardware as "milestone" technologies came out (like progressive scan). All the while I was buying 1 to 3 DVDs a week. All new and retail...mostly from Best Buy. Not only did I love watching these movies but I found value in collecting the movies as well as box sets.
Fast forward to today. I am so frustrated with the state of entertainment and how restrictive and greedy these companies are that I am finding it impossible to support them. I have not bought new audio or video hardware in years and what I do have is DRM and CP free. I do still buy an occasional DVD but instead of 1 to 3 a week I may buy 1 every other month or so. I still do rent frequently. I also go out occasionally to a movie as well....like I did the other weekend when I saw "Pirates".
All I can say is $132 million in one weekend is completely insane. First of all, the movie was a gigantic let down. All I could think about was "when is this movie going to end?" I never feel that way about a movie. I think Depp is brilliant and I love his character but it wasn't enough to make this movie good...but still...$132 million. Biggest opening ever! What a joke.
So I got to thinking. With fuel costs rising and a majority of that being tax, why not shift the burden of this tax from fuel to entertainment? Let's tax every single DVD, movie ticket, merchandise, and CD with a new "entertainment tax" and remove the tax from fuel. If you want to go out and buy "You've got mail" it's going to cost you $25 for the DVD ($15 for the DVD and $10 for the tax). If you want to go out to the movies, expect to pay $15 or so dollars per ticket ($9 for the ticket and $6 for tax). CDs will no longer be $9 or $10 but more like $15 to $20. iTunes now will cost $2.50 per track to cover the tax. I am totally fine with all of this.
Now some of you may be saying, "wait a sec, I'll never pay $15-20 per movie ticket, that's ridiculous!" Not really. Everyone would still go out to the movies. Everyone would still buy DVDs. Everyone would still download iTunes they would just be more selective on what they purchased. This would drive the revenues down which in turn would bring the stupid, insane, moronic salaries of our movie stars down to more reasonable, earth-bound rate. How insane is it that these people make 10s of millions playing make-believe. Their jobs are not hard. The work they do is better than what most of us consider a vacation. Same goes for musicians and athletes. Let's start taxing these industries as heavily as we tax the energy industry.
High gas prices affect every aspect of our economy. If the entire entertainment industry collapsed tomorrow, I would say "good riddance" or "you made your bed now sleep in it". Hell, we could subsidize energy based off of entertainment tax. Put something like this in place their focus would most definitely shift from DRM to how they we attract more customers.