Ann L Humphrey

Taxidermy: getting under the skin of tax law

MiPod: a matter of taste
07.06.10

I’ve finally given in and bought myself an iPod. It’s unlike me to resist a gadget this long but I must have known how it would go. Now I am loading my entire music collection on to it. ‘Feed me, Seymour, feed me’ says iTunes each time I walk past my laptop.
 
Apart from consuming inordinate amounts of time, this exercise has led to some interesting discoveries. I hadn’t realised, for example, that there were so many references to Customs’ officers in Carmen - but then I’d forgotten about all the smuggling. I also learned that the title of the Cherubini opera ‘Les Deux Journées’, refers to the two days in which Cardinal Mazarin imprisoned the President of the French Parliament for vetoing his tax laws. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who succeeded Mazarin and became finance minister to Louis XIV, is reputed to have said that ‘the art of taxation is to pluck the maximum number of feathers from the goose with the minimum amount of hissing’.
 
I’m not an opera buff – I admit to falling asleep in La Somnambula – and most of my friends would roll their eyes if asked to comment on my taste in music (Sa Ding Ding, Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, Nitin Sawhney and Sigur Rós are amongst my favourites). Now putting my iPod on shuffle gives me the opportunity to lull them with a little Mozart before hitting them with the Pogues.
 
When it comes to purchasing music, it’s worth remembering that consignments of goods with a combined value of less than £18 qualify for relief from UK VAT and import duty. This explains why it’s often cheaper to increase your CD collection by buying from a supplier based outside the EU (the Channel Islands, for example), and is also the reason why your order may arrive in more than one package. If you download music, different rules apply and UK VAT is chargeable where the seller is based outside the EU. As with all things VAT-related, however, nothing is as it seems - the Isle of Man is not outside the EU for this purpose but the Channel Islands are.
 
For anyone who ever wondered what accountants would come up with if they were to allowed to pitch their song ideas, there was an email doing the rounds a while ago with a few possible suggestions. Have a look at these three which amused me:
http://i29.tinypic.com/11l05qo.jpg
http://i28.tinypic.com/16ge9sk.jpg
http://i25.tinypic.com/zipp3b.jpg