> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.

This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid.

Applies to all venues and events. Bars, restaurants, grocery shops, barbers, sports events, concerts, taxis, lounges, everything with an audience.

I don't want to say it's the same everywhere in the EU, but I have always assumed it's a common concept in most western countries at least.

In most EU countries private copying levies are paid to the copyright mafia any time you purchase a hard drive, printer or even a blank cassette. Because you know, you might copy something using it.

On its own, nothing seems out of the ordinary. It's the extremes that La Liga takes to ensure they're getting that 200€/m that makes it insane.

This is common in many countries around the world.

I’m sure the prices have gone up since that comment, but 200€/month actually seems very reasonable for a commercial bar that shows sporting events. That’s let’s than 7€/day and would be more than covered by the first group of people walking in the door and buying a round of drinks.

I don’t approve of the microphone activation spying stuff or the ridiculous internet blocking. However it’s also kind of bizarre that it reached this point when the monthly fees for bar owners were such a trivial amount.

I think the outrage should be directed at an app secretly recording everything to look for "pirated content".

Do bars in the US just show matches on a residential cable tv connection?

It's not the same everywhere in the EU, but here in Poland as an establishment owner you have to pay this fee to an agency that purports to represent the musicians. As you describe eg. Spotify in background.

This agency pays out proportionately to registered licensed musicians, but the proportions are calculated in some ridiculous way that doesn't really factor in who's music is played. It means that the only folks who get reasonable payouts from this agency are, like, stars and old hits authors. The ones who's music gets played a lot in radio and other places. Winners take all.

The reality is that a lot of that cash is really for some chums who's job it is to be controllers.

AFAIK the entire scheme is a result of that one and only legacy industry that needs to protect it's interests: football and sports in venues, and maybe music clubs. In practice it means you rarely see TVs in bars the way you do in the US.

Idk it's a shitty concept imho.

What about this music from these free pages which are flooding the internet? There is plenty of royality free music? (e.g. used by youtubers?)

is it different from turning on radio?