Few people know this, but your smartphone is charging you a fee for a service you never use.

This tax can weigh quite a bit when you buy your phone, whether it is new or refurbished.

A new smartphone can quickly become expensive. The most recent and advanced models largely exceed the amount of a minimum wage in France and some devices can even reach 2000 euros when you add a few options concerning storage or RAM. This is why many French people are turning to simpler and more affordable devices. However, when we compare the price of a device sold in France with its price on American soil, we quickly notice a fairly big difference since a smartphone costs more here.

The cause: the different European and French taxes that can affect an imported product. However, these taxes do not only have bad sides since they encourage consumers to buy from brands domiciled in France or with stores physically present in the country. There is, however, a tax that many smartphone owners are unaware of and that concerns a service that very few people use.

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Called the “private royalty tax”, the latter is not really a tax in reality, but a remuneration offered to authors, publishers, artists and music producers. It is collected from manufacturers of storage devices such as USB sticks, external hard drives and… smartphones. Its principle: take a portion of the price of your device to pay it back to the artists in order to offset the fact of being able to store music on your product.

Concretely, since your phone is capable of storing MP3 files, it is subject to the private royalty and its purchase is accompanied by a portion paid to the artists. However, and according to several studies conducted in France, very few smartphone owners still store music locally on their device. The vast majority now benefit from applications and video or music streaming sites like YouTube or Spotify to listen to music. A solution often considered faster and more practical, and which only requires a few seconds to find your favorite music.

Downloading and storing MP3 files is generally longer to set up and often illegal if you do not go through an official distributor and pay the download rights. The subject of the tax on the private royalty regularly comes up in the public debate as well as in the government. Several players in the field have already tried to put an end to it by designating it as “useless” or “stupid”. It still represents a little more than 10 euros on the total price of the purchase of a smartphone.

The cherry on the cake: this tax is valid on new smartphones, but also on reconditioned ones that have already been subject to the same tax when they are first sold as new devices! So you are paying twice the same fee for a service that you probably don't even use.