I woke up to a rather disturbing update regarding Europe: everything digital will be taxed as of 2015 if it involves Europe in any way. This applies even to me despite being American because some of my buyers and clients are based in Europe, so now, I either have to be a VAT accountant or prevent sales to that continent unless I'm using a storefront like iTunes.

Unfortunately, Bandcamp is affected by this as well. As a direct-to-fan platform, Bandcamp musicians now HAVE to worry about paying VAT for any sales they make on that site. So unfortunately, I'm going to have to either pay European taxes (a process I'm not supposed to be worried about as an American), or pull my content from Bandcamp.

Worst part is, I have it somewhat easy: some of my music on Bandcamp is exclusively sold via a label I'm not in charge of. Then again, my label might fold under because of this, especially since it's based in Romania.

See for yourself:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/index_en.htm

Best advice I can give to change this, if that ever happens: make sure everyone knows about this. Repost bits of this journal if necessary. One reason this happened at all is because no non-politicians knew about it. In the meantime, I'm going to have to go through the unnecessary process of reading up on European taxes for my catalog...

UPDATE: while it seems VATMOSS will still be impending (meaning direct sellers will still be burdened by this), Bandcamp has finally buckled down and agreed to pay the VAT for us musicians already. Sorry everyone for the scare.