Well, welcome everyone to the panel. It looks like we might be having the
same kind of intimate conversation we got to have last week when the panelists,
met together to chat about what we were going to be talking about today. So I'll,
I'll start out. I'm Christina Baade, and I'm here,
I'm joining you from McMaster University, where I work.
Both McMaster and I live on the traditional territories of the Mississauga
and people, and of course, ongoing territories. This is, of course, like many
of us, especially who are in the GTA, land that is protected by the Dish with
One Spoon Wampum, which calls us to be in right relation with the land,
and I've been reflecting a lot on Darlene Laforme's introductory remarks to this conference
that was asking us to really take time and think, and also really about the discussions
we've been having about sovereignty and the responsibilities that I, as a white settler
have in both working against colonialism and its legacy, about learning about listening
and also really, of course, thinking about sovereignty and calling on my government to be in right
relationship with First Nations, Inuit, Métis peoples in Canada.
So, we'll kind of work through in our introductions with the various folks to sort
of locate ourselves. But I did want to sort of introduce this panel and our wonderful
panelists we have today who are all folks who love music. I think we've all worked
in different areas as musicians or music makers or when the, you know, the way of music-ing
and are also thinking about policy at the local and up to national levels.
And we've engaged in these, with music and thinking critically through music in these
different ways. And it starts out by asking about the impact of the pandemic
on Canadian music-making, music institutions and industries, as well as musical livelihoods.
And we're especially interested in how musicians and music communities are responding and also
how policy at the the local, provincial, and national levels could do better.
But of course, we're very conscious of the fact that the pandemic
is only one of many crises to hit musicians and music makers and music communities. And
so we want to be thinking almost through three temporalities today. The, you know, before
times, the pandemic, and the future, being very aware of the ways that inequalities and problems
have always been shaping and making contingent the lives and livelihoods of musicians.
So we're going to start out by taking turns, locating ourselves biographically in this
musical landscape that we're sort of sketching out here. And thinking about ourselves
as doers, makers, and thinkers. So, you know, we're also going to be sharing some links
to projects that we might be working on, whether they're, you know, related to scholarship
and...
So thinking about
how we're located and can respond. So I think I'll leave off there. I guess I will
locate myself as you know, mostly I'm a professor, and I talk about music and audio technologies
and stardom, but I also sometimes moonlight as a clarinetist and bass clarinetist
that occasionally wanders out into the world.
So I will turn things over to the next person, we'll go maybe alphabetically by last name
to Dr. Mark Campbell from the University of Toronto.
Thank you, Dr. Baade. I am located actually right now in the traditional territories of the
Mississaugas of Lake Scugog, which is just outside of the University of Toronto campus,
University of Toronto Scarborough campus.
I am a professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a curator and
DJ, and I sort of work between all those spaces, I would like to think, with equal vigour,
but I know right now the artistic practice is suffering as the end of the school
year kind of devours the rest of my time.
Thank you.
Thanks and moving on, going again, alphabetically by last name, to Dr. Brian Fauteaux from
the University of Alberta.
Hi everyone. Good morning slash afternoon. I'm here coming from
Treaty Six territory, or Edmonton, from my basement, and I'm an assistant professor of
popular music studies and media studies here. Over the last few years, I've been
working with some colleagues on a project, looking at issues of, you know, artists
making a living in the digital era.
We've been involved in some hearings and submitting briefs to processes
of copyright review taking place here in Canada. Perhaps I'll send some links
to those briefs a little later on. I play the drums as well and have played in
various bands over the years, mostly just as, you know, side projects and things,
never as, you know, the primary thing that I've done.
But I've found that it's an interesting thing to pair with research into the music industry.
Great. Thanks so much, Brian. Next is Dr. Casey Mecija, who's at York University.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Casey Mecija, and I'm currently located in the area
known as Tkaronto, which has been taken care by the Anishinaabe nation, the Haudenosaunee
Confederacy, and the Huron Wendat, and is now home to many First Nation, Inuit, and Métis communities.
I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York
University, and I'm also an interdisciplinary primarily doing work in music and film.
Between roughly 2004 and 2014, I was the lead singer of a seven-piece orchestral pop
band called Ohbijou. And I released a solo album called Psychic Materials in 2016.
I've sat on a number of music grant juries, and have consulted with arts organizations
on issues of equity. I consider myself a theorist of sound diaspora and cultural
production, and intrinsic to my academic research is my experience as a musician.
So, thank you to the organizing committee for having me and to my fellow panelists for sharing
in today's conversation.
Great. Thank you so much, Casey. We now move on to doctor Laura Risk at the University
of Toronto.
Thanks. I'm coming to you on Zoom from Montreal, which is the traditional
territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka people, a meeting place for many First
Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples here.
I'm in the same department as Mark Campbell, Arts Culture and Media at the
University of Toronto Scarborough. And my focus, I'd say my focus until
the pandemic was on traditional fiddle music, traditional music in Quebec. I'm also
a musician prior to my academic life. I was a working musician,
I still am a working musician. A lot of touring, recording, teaching, the general musical
freelance lifestyle. And with the pandemic was pretty much the
almost total devastation of that. Sorry, there's something. Oh, I see. We're all being
spotlighted. Okay. Thank you. With the almost total devastation of
the independent music
industry or the touring and performing, my research took a bit of a turn, and
I started working on a project about the impact of the pandemic on musicians and musical communities,
and I'm just finishing up co-editing a triple special issue of critical studies and improvisation
on that topic. So the first volume is out, it's one special issue, the second volume will
probably be out next week, and I'll put a link to that in the chat.
So a fair amount of what I'll have to say today will probably be coming out of that
work. Thanks.
Thanks so much, Laura. And last, but certainly not least is,
there's, Alanna Stuart who is joining us, who is a musician who, and thinker about
music, who is joining us from Toronto.
Hello, my name is Alanna Stuart.
Like Casey, I'm located in what we identify as Toronto, Tkaronto. I'm also
an interdisciplinary artist, but I primarily identify as a music maker, as a producer, an
audio engineer, a songwriter, and a vocalist, and all those slashes in my name
are important. My sounds and how I identify merges my experience, or emerged from
my experiences as a black woman creating music in the popular music sector.
My main projects are Bonjay, which is a hybrid sound rooted in Jamaican dance
hall culture. So lots of heavy, heavy bass and pummelling kick. But mixed with
the vocal vulnerability of artists like Feist or esoteric nature of artists like Kate Bush.
I'm also a vocalist in the Queer Songbook Orchestra, which presents queer stories
and hidden queer histories of popular music interspersed with songs in live music.
And most recently, I have begun expanding my solo practice as Pyne, and all
of those sounds are hybrid sounds and reflections of the multiplicity of my identity
as a second generation, Caribbean Canadian child of immigrants, as well as the daughter
of a foster mother. So much of my work Is inspired by the feeling of being an outsider,
even within my own home, and trying to find a place for sounds and expressions that
emerged from in between this.
So that's the what. More recently I became an accidental academic, and all the
implications of those tasks, those tenets of my identity inspired an exploration
into understanding my place in the music industry, more specifically looking at this
term, diversity, that is thrown around in the music industry and celebrated, but
doesn't have a clear understanding of how that guides how we work, who we work
with, how we value the ideas within the music industry, et cetera.
So I've been doing qualitative research, understanding how diversity works within the
Canadian independent music scene, and also researching diversity and innovation
within the music industry and all the socio-political, the human complexities that
feed those terms.
That information has formed the why, has reinforced the why of
the music that I'm making. And I'll elaborate more on those projects and how
that has impacted how I operated in the pandemic, pre-pandemic and post. So I'm a music
maker, and I'm a thinker, and my name's Alanna.
Thanks so much Alanna. So you have a sense of where we're coming from. As you can see,
we're engaged with a range of different locations in Canada, a range of different genres
and scenes, as we love to say in music studies. I want to take up this theme
that was coming up in the conversations that we were having leading up to this panel,
which is this idea about sustainability, and something that we talk about for, you
know, both music making, but also for musicians and how we negotiate these institutional,
industrial, and regulatory structures. And, also the ways that this concept of
sustainability, this experience of trying to sustain music, communities, and musicians
is so raced, gendered, shaped by class and disability. And so I guess I want to start
by asking this very simply framed, but very challenging and complicated question.
When we talk about sustainability in relation to music making, what do we mean?
I mean, I can take a stab at it, and hopefully it'll open up some more thinking around this
concept. I think this is an important provocation, and it's one that necessarily structures
how we might imagine a future for music in all its forms and for all of its players.
I think there is some key inquiries that ground my thinking around the meaning of sustainability,
though, I do think that the meetings are flexible and contingent on who and where we are
physically and socially located.
So Christina, you gestured to this a little bit, but you know, sustainability is generally
understood as the capability of something being maintained, or it's associated with
the avoidance of the depletion of a resource. So using those definitions perhaps as
a starting point, some important questions and provocations come to mind.
So, is music a resource? And if so, what value does it bring to the quality of human life?
Is it in a state of depletion? If so, is it only in the state because the creation
of music has become tied to capital accumulation? You know, does sustainability refer to
the trading of sound for money as a means of maintaining a livelihood?
Is sustainability linked to renumeration, and if so, what is sacrificed in the exchange?
Or what communities of sound makers, of sound and infrastructures of music, go unnoticed
or unrecognized because of this exchange, or you know, what communities go unnoticed because
they operate outside or resist this lure of capitalism, you know, is the goal to get paid?
And if so, how is this done? Equitably. Or are we thinking about environmental sustainability
and the environmental consequences of the music industry itself? You know, so for
example, in 2017 at Coachella, this big festival in the States generated 107 tons of waste
per day at 20% of which was recycable.
You know, so music creation, performance, and the infrastructures required for digital streaming
leave this enormous carbon footprint. So are we imagining sustainability within a consideration
of continued environmental degradation? Are we talking about the sustainability of
music, education, music infrastructures, such as granting systems or regulatory bodies?
So for example, how might music education, which has proven mental health benefits, be
sustained? If someone like Doug Ford continues to cut from education, you know, in 2021,
the Ford government confirmed that they'd be cutting 1.6 billion from education, which
includes music education. So if we're thinking about sustainability in this realm, it seems
that any policy should be oriented towards safeguarding funds to ensure music education
and the quality of that education is equitably distributed across school boards.
And I won't ramble on too long, but you know, it seems all of these questions are
entangled, but I think for us to have a meaningful conversation, which doesn't float in vagueness
or redundancies, because this conversation is not new. In fact, many of us on this panel
have had this conversation multiple times before, and we need to know
or narrow in on what we are chatting about, you know, so as a musician who has toured
for over a decade, music has never offered me financial sustainability, nor did I ever
imagine it to. This is not to say that I didn't hope that it would, but I was always
cognizant that I wasn't going to sell a lot of records, nor did I create music that would
fit within a popular imaginary, or my music wouldn't have been rendered, um, you know, profitable.
And this speaks to the ways that sustainability is indeed race, gender, and class, and that
ideas of sustainability or financial sustainability are loaded with exclusions. And I guess my
prevailing concerns are around, you know, the sociopolitical implications of sustainability
and what potentially gets reproduced when advocating for it.
I mean, there's a lot there, and I rambled, but I think I have more questions than I have
answers for this particular, you know, line of inquiry. So thanks.
Thanks so much, Casey. I think you've really sort of like laid the ground for us. You know,
talking about these concepts about, you know, livelihood for musicians, these issues about
music as a social good, which I think is implicit in that sort of role of education. The very
important, you know, an ongoing, you know, probably the way we use sustainability most
in terms of the environment and, you know, the ways that you've been bringing capital
and unequal access, to [...] support.
And, you know, obviously, these are all really valuable threads to be pulling up, and I appreciate
the way that you're asking for specificity. And I know that many of us have been thinking
and working on these questions in really specific ways. And I wonder if somebody else wants
to jump in with their thoughts about that.
I can just quickly maybe say a little bit about how our project has looked at issues
of sustainability within kind of the context of Canada. When so much of the music industries
are sort of dictated by global corporations, and a lot of what we've been talking about
or looking at is what it means for, you know, heightened industry concentration and things
like the monopolization of the music industries, for things like earning a living, but also
for thinking about diverse, equitable music infrastructure, things like venues,
how grants are allocated, you know, in some of the stuff.
We've been looking at, or that, you know, some of you may be familiar with these
sorts of stats too, but, in 2017, the US music industry generated $43 billion
and artists received, uh, 12% of that. And within that 12%, a 1% of artists accounted
for 77% of all recorded music income. In and around 2014 and in 2020, the top
1% was accounting for 90% of streams,
and the top 10% of artists accounted for 99.4%. So we're looking at what that means for
the artists outside of that. Even looking at the Canadian industries from across 2005
to 2017, Drake, the Weeknd, and Justin have dominated. They have the top eight
most streamed songs of Canadian musicians, 31 of the top 50 and 72 of the top 150.
So sometimes people will point to the fact that there is a vibrant and healthy,
you know, record industry or music industry in Canada. But it's often pointing to the
stats that show that there's these three major players in the industry,
but also things like, or, we've been focused on what it means for artists in Edmonton and Winnipeg.
Many have to leave to go to places like Toronto to get their careers going. Half of Factor
grant money over the, about the last 10 years has gone to Ontario musicians, despite
the province having less than 40% of the population. So there's that, you know, need to sort
of be located in one or two or three, uh, centers.
So we have new recommendations we've been working through with respect to, you
know, what we might do moving forward, or think about moving forward with respect to,
how policy might play out. But I think I'll just stop there for now and let some
others sort of get in there and talk about this topic of sustainability.
I can jump in. Thank you both for introducing such a broad spectrum
of what sustainability means. It helps me feel a little bit less responsible,
personally responsible, for my contribution as an artist to maintaining
the music industry when I'm so aware of the systems that are guiding my own efforts,
but I did want to take it,
I did want to ground the idea of sustainability in the personal and in the self, because there's
so much weight put on the systems, the power of systems and how they guide, how
we, how you live. But when I think about sustainability, I think about the maintenance of self, you
know, emotional health, mental health, even the idea of identity,
and I'm thinking about this in the context of the pandemic. And just to anchor, you
know, my contributions to the conversation I do work in the academic world, but
I'm going to be anchoring it in my experience as an artist, as a music lover, as a person,
so I'll be speaking anecdotally and might introduce some academic theory just to make
it seem like I know what I'm talking about.
So when I think about, um, sustainability, I think about the maintenance of self,
and especially with the music, it's like, we're people making music for the consumption
of other people, and so I really am concerned about, how do I avoid burnout? How
do I maintain my identity as an artist in the face of the realistic adults responsibilities
of having to pay rent?
When I think about wanting to be a good person and wanting to make a contribution
to the world, how do I maintain my value system? How do I maintain my morality? As
an artist operating within a music industry and all the capitalistic
or the economic implications of that.
And so I guess I don't really have an answer, but a personal curiosity is how do I maintain
myself in the face of all these systems? And all the obstacles and barriers that are
presented. And what are the opportunities to, you know, we were talking about
sustainability, but another question that comes up is what are we sustaining?
What is it that we're maintaining, but with the pandemic, there's an opportunity to question
what has been sustained that we want to actually dismantle. And so that's the curiosity that
I'd like to introduce, and I'm sure that as we speak more.... There are different
artistic practices and also artists initiatives that have sought to
do the opposite of maintaining, but to break down the various systems that we've,
we've brought up.
Oh, go ahead, Mark. I was, you muted yourself so quickly, now I'm thrown
into the spotlight. Thank you. I was going to riff off of Alanna's piece, just really thinking
about, at the level of discourse, right? Like, so taking it outside of even music communities
and, you know, I was thinking, as I'm doing research and, you know, staying up on what's
happening in the music world since the pandemic, you know, in the last, I don't even know
how long it's been, but, musicians have made like $60 million from NFT sales in the,
probably in the last 12 months.
And that whole world is kind of exploding and what's scary about it is that, in
terms of sustainability, is that the conversation is still there. There's still two parallel
conversations. There's one about, look at artists getting rich. And then there's, like,
the very, very fringe folks that are saying actually the mining of NFTs and the mining
of cryptocurrency is, you know, the rate of electricity use is so much higher than
so many other things in the world.
And then you have like this fraction of avant-garde kind of activist folks unable to penetrate
the hype and the sort of the discourse where you'll find like Rolling
Stone magazine or Variety magazine will always report on, you know. We'll report on financial
figures, right? Like how the, and always this kind of hopeful thing of the independent artists,
and there's never a moment in the beginning of discourse where there's a coupling of the
economic benefits and the sustainability questions or the environmental impact. It always kind
of diverges so that if you're, even if you're doing the research, if you could spend all
day and learn about how much money, you know, Elon Musk's wife made through an NFT kind
of thing.
And it would take you, like, a week before you'd figure out what, you know, what are
the gas fees and the mining environmental impacts of NFT,-ing any piece of music.
So I find that so problematic at the level of discourse, so that in the academic venue
like this, we can zero in on sustainability, but
we can barely penetrate major media to start discussing this thing at a level in which
we could all learn really quickly. You know, it's actually quite difficult. Laura?
Thanks Mark. I love this conversation. I guess since I'm the last of the
panelists to speak on sustainability, I feel like there's so many important ideas
that have come out.
I'm going to try to maybe draw some connections in and point to some new questions. Casey,
I love that you started out with a definition of sustainability as maintaining
the status quo, maintaining something. I don't know if we want to call it the status quo,
and avoiding the depletion of resources, because that really made me think.
Do we want to maintain the status quo in music? I'm not talking about the artistic
side here. I'm talking about, I'm talking about the financial precarity side. I'm talking
about the burn out and the pain, the rent that Alanna was mentioning. And
these kinds of structures that have come up, I think, across
all of this conversation that, Brian really pointed to it, the sort of the big players
versus the independents.
The fact that when we talk about the money in the music industry, we talk about big numbers
that are actually a very, very small percent of people and of companies, right,
organizations. What is it, the last statistics I saw offered. Self-employment, or we can call
it freelancing, in the Canadian music industry were something like 60 to 70%.
I actually think that's probably under-representing the numbers. That depends who is being surveyed.
Another survey, sorry, that was from the UK, said that 92% of the industry is what
they call, I think it was individual to small enterprises. I think we can imagine
that as a person and their partner running some kind of, you know, music business out
of their home, like touring, independent record label, whatever that is they're doing, but
that's the industry we're talking about.
But what we often hear about in the news and where these big numbers
come from is that 8% at the top, or the 10%, or whatever it is. And I think
what we've seen in the pandemic is that, the freelancers, the
independents, they're sustaining us as a society through what
I would call effective labor.
I would say unfairly, or not compensated, effective labor. In
other words, essentially sharing music, not just sharing music, but sharing the
intimacies of our life, like creating some kind of communal spaces for us to interact
at a time when we're not supposed to interact in person.
So creating spaces online, creating spaces through music, creating a sense of meaning,
and coming together through music, and not being paid for it. Except
through the emergency funding that we've seen with the pandemic, which in some ways has
provided a model for what, say, something like universal basic income might actually offer
to musicians, which is the kind of stability that they've never had.
So let me put out, maybe I could put out a couple ideas here. Maybe we don't
want to maintain the status quo for music. Maybe we don't want to just, maybe,
maybe the status quo for music is actually the depletion of resources. Um, as streaming,
as streaming revenue goes down for artists, but go up for some small segment of the industry
and then as live streaming moves into that space.
So now, not only is your recorded music providing basically no income, but now
your life performances, which are online, are in the same boat because it's donations, it's
tips. Who's getting the money from that, Facebook through advertising YouTube?
So maybe we don't want to, maybe we don't want sustainability.
Maybe we don't want to maintain that status quo. So I was just going to put
another word out, and maybe we would want to work toward thriving instead of sustaining.
And what would that look like? I think that comes not through focusing on the,
the macro economics of the industry, but focusing on how we're sustaining communities, local
communities, small communities of musicians, musicians working within communities,
and how musicians provide a human support for communities, and
then how we're providing support for musicians to do that. Okay. I'll put that on the table.
Thanks so much, Laura. And I think what, you know, all these wise things that people
have been saying, I think it really points to the limits of thinking about music in terms
of labor and the sort of, like, you know, advocacy for fair payment for musicians.
Especially if we're looking at, you know, this divide between, you know, we have
this kind of split, it seems like, between talking about the sort of affective labor,
the kind of communities and embeddedness of musicians and holding up, you know, our
feelings of connection and our, you know, our emotional sustenance, and then
these very macro kinds of ways as people have been saying, as Laura was saying and others.
And so one of the things that did run through our conversation was the sort of framing about
community music making and industry. And we were sort of talking to them, pushing against
the idea whether these are dichotomous, framings or not, but it probably would be a good idea
to sort of clarify a little bit more what we mean by this, especially by community music
making and especially thinking about like, you know, again, how do individuals negotiate
these sorts of lines?
And, you know, also thinking about those roles about social justice and diversity work, you
know, thinking about, say how Sara Ahmed has been talking about diversity work as often
descriptive and not necessarily transformational, not necessarily leading to the thriving that
Laura has put on the table. So again, we'd love to hear from folks talking about
these questions.
Okay. I'm going to start here, so I don't have to go last cause that's the hardest
spot. And because when we talked about this last week, I think I was given the
job of coming up with a better definition of community music than the one I gave last
week. So, I do teach a course at Scarborough called Exploring Community Music,
so I feel like I have to have a decent definition. So let me just, maybe I'll just
put a few ideas out for that and then pass on the conversation. Community music is
a term that has entered the academy fairly recently, and I think often we set
it up in opposition to several other things.
Sometimes we set up community music in opposition to what we could call, I don't know, conservatory
style, pre-professional training, or we could, we could set up community music in
opposition to the music industry. And as Christina just said, maybe we don't want to make
that separation. And I would agree with that.
Community music as an umbrella term gets used in many different contexts. Sometimes
it's just used for things like amateur musical activities, like community orchestras and
community choirs and community bands. So in other words, amateur, non-professional
music making. Sometimes it's used more in a sense,
communal music group. So this is some kind of group that is based around participation,
open access. There's often, like, an eclectic repertoires and some kind of shared repertoire,
but it's more just like, let's create a space and people come together and make music. And
again, there tends to be an non-professional focus to that.
Sometimes community music gets used as a term for music that's associated with what
we'd call an, I'm putting some quotes, cultural communities, which raises its own
questions about who is not in a cultural community. And then community music, I think,
especially is used to refer to music that has some kind of proactive, interventionist
agenda.
So these are sometimes broadly lumped under the phrase
of things like, a phrase like "music for social change." So some kind of music, musical activity
that's, say, helping youth stay in school or working with prison populations, or bringing together
groups in a warring country, or so on.
I'd just like to add to all of these ways of thinking about
community music as an academic subject, which is one thing that it's become
recently, or that is that, I'm not sure that music exists outside of community.
I don't know that we have music that's not community music.
I don't know that we make music in ways that are not grounded in community. But
we tend to privilege. We tend to focus on individuals. We tend to lift up individuals.
But what if we were to lift up communities and look at the space, the place of musicians
in those contexts? I'm going to pass it on.
Thanks so much, Laura, and Alanna?
I was just thinking about the idea of, is there a
such thing as a music outside of community? And I think about a new AI,
I'm like allergic to AI at the moment, but I think about AI generated music. I mean,
it's technically music, you know?
And I think about the music industry that I came up in, I started working in the
music industry at age 14. And it was very formulaic, my development as an artist
back then. Canada was very focused on emulating an American popular, American idea
of success, which was very industry driven, and the music that I was creating, the lyrics
that I was guided towards writing, the changing of my name and my bio without my,
knowledge was all driven for industry success.
I was creating music. There was no community to be found, but my music managed
to find its way through certain pipelines to the radio. And so I think about that.
And would that, would that be considered music? Are we talking about, like, how are we
evaluating music in that, in that sense when I hear music can only kind of exist within
community?
And then I think about the challenge, a challenge that I brought up earlier. We
can have our own personal motivation, but music, which is a thing that's meant to be
shared, has to encounter other mindsets, other social norms, value systems, motivations,
in what happens to the meaning of that music
once it encounters other people, or people outside of the community. And I think
that there tends to be an allergic reaction to the word industry, or there can be.
It could feel, and this is not a criticism of you, I'm reflecting on my own
personal inner tensions and trying to create music that is meaningful.
But then also this word, sustainability, the idea of trying to sustain a practice, the
idea of trying to sustain myself, and the conflict that comes up
between industry and community. And I think about, what's coming to mind is
the Jamaican music industry, as a site that has successfully been able to
integrate the two or create at the intersection of community and industry.
So a bit of background, I mentioned earlier that I'm second generation Caribbean Canadian,
a child of immigrants. My father is from Jamaica, and dance hall reggae is music that comes
from Jamaica. But it wasn't until four years ago that I went to Jamaica for the first
time and really encountered the community and the industry, the creative practices
that has birthed what I identify as one of the most successful or one of the most innovative
creative hubs in the world.
And the reason why I bring it up is because Jamaica is a place that punches above
its weight culturally, and its music has been co-opted by music industries and scenes around
the world, but it's still an economically depleted country. And so, I think it's
a perfect example of the potential that lies in having community music
more actively engaged with the music industry, but also is a warning of what happens
when it's not done properly.
What happens to the music makers that are innovating and creating music out of,
creating music from community within an industry that exploits. And so first of
all, are you guys following me at the moment? I'm trying to build the case for
not having these two ideas of creation and production
operate on opposite ends of the aisle, but bringing them together to explore the possibilities
of how can we create that thriving at the intersection of the two. And Jamaica,
I think, is an example of how that can be. So I'll give you a bit of a background
on the Jamaican music industry, how it came to be and why I think that it's
a place that we should explore as a site for exploring those possibilities.
So the music industry in Jamaica started in community music. It's rooted in sound system
culture. A Jamaican sound system is essentially a PA, but it's stacked, like, 18 feet high.
It blasts bass and sound across neighbourhoods, and it was created because music was
being created by people in marginalized communities of lower socioeconomic status, who, because
of that socioeconomic status, couldn't get their music.
on traditional radio, they didn't have that. They didn't have that power. So they said,
in true Jamaican braggadocio, said, okay, fine. You don't want to play my music on the radio,
you're going to hear me anyway. So they created these sound systems and would blast sounds
and the community messages across neighbourhoods, and the music was so catching that eventually
the music, despite not having access to traditional media channels, became the popular music of
the country.
And it became a site for experimentation where new sounds would be tested out. People would,
compete with each other to have the newest sounds, the most innovative sounds. And out
of that sound system culture, out of that community music, reggae came, dance
hall came, ska, rocksteady, et cetera, et cetera.
So the Jamaican music industry is built on community music. The sound system became a
sociopolitical tool and insistence on present, but the music was so catching that it attracted,
producers, DJs, music fans from around the world, and over time, Jamaica
became, essentially, a farm team for new musical genres.
And we look at places like London, UK, that built on this community music and
sound system culture to create other world-renowned sounds, like grime, or drum and bass, jungle,
et cetera. And because it had access to certain power structures and certain resources, it
was able to build on that community music spirit
and that openness to new sounds and innovation, but also be able to exploit it in a way that
they were able to, but also that access to resources enabled them to sustain
the music industry. So I guess I bring that up as a possibility of building on community
music. But trying to introduce the idea of, well, how do we, in the face of resources,
not take away from that community music spirit, but then still amplify the
voices of the community.
So I said a lot there, but I was just trying to introduce an example or possibility,
that exists when those two intersect, because I hesitate to separate
the two. I hesitate to think of them as in opposition. And I really want to bring
them a bit closer together to see what possibilities lie in that intersection.
Can I two pieces of like, relevant information? Is that copyright was not existence. Copyright
was not enforced in the 1940s, 50, 60 seventies and eighties in Jamaica. So, you know,
the amount of governmental interference in terms of policies and procedures, you know,
one of the greatest failures of the Jamaican government is that they never invested in
their music.
They never ever invested in the music and the music thrived globally, despite lack of
government support. So we have arts councils here. We have all kinds of grants, we have
all kinds of things. And yet, you know, I make my students, I hard press
my students to tell me, name five genres of music invented in Canada with the 30 million
people that we have, versus, I could name five genres of music invented by two and a half
million people on one island.
And that speaks volumes about the role of the government, the role of industry, you
know, cause there was lots of opportunities to make music in Jamaica. There was,
there wasn't lots of opportunities to be sued for sampling. There wasn't lots of opportunities
to get ripped off in a record deal kind of thing.
So there's a bunch of different variables there that I think, if we think through that
example, we ask different questions about the role of policy and the role of government
either in stimulating or controlling because the term, you know, copyright, is
a concept that comes out of Europe.
And it's a concept about, quote unquote, protecting writers specifically. But again, like most
things it gets co-opted by industry. Even, you know, so industries, weaponize copyright,
and actually prevent people from making things. Like Disney copywriting,
the happy birthday song, you know, like the, that kind of ridiculousness means that community
can't thrive in those spaces
when governmental policies or industry lenses are hegemonic.
I'd be curious to know, Laura or anybody, are there examples, successful examples where,
like Jamaica, there is the free flowing of ideas and community music is stimulating
the new ideas that sustain the cultural ecosystem, but at the same time, the people creating
these ideas can equally benefit from them or benefit from them as much as the music
industry?
Is that possible, or is that a pipe dream?
Well, maybe I'll just jump in because I was going
to say actually, maybe two things that respond both the Alanna's points and Mark's points.
The first being, I think there's an interesting example of the application of community within
the community radio sector. And that's a place where bigger, profitable radio stations
give Canadian content development funds to stations to not play hit music, you know,
let volunteers on the air, you know, the volunteers aren't necessarily being paid for, or often
not being paid for their labor.
But if we're thinking of that sort of training ground idea, it could be where you
have more ideas circulating that could bleed into more mainstream or profitable channels.
And we've been thinking about how we might take that sort of model, diverting funds
from profitable, more profitable commercial companies that benefit from monopolies to
things like venues that operate with ideas or mandates of communities in place.
And maybe that is a sustainability question that, you know, helps them to, exist
that isn't tied so much to markets. But I think on the point of copyright as well,
something we've been advocating for, I'll just put two links to two different briefs
in the chat here. These are... the first one was to the standing committee on Canadian
Heritage, renewed renumeration models for artists, and there's links to PDFs in both
of those.
And in this case, we were really arguing against the, at this time, what was about
to become a reality of copyright term extension in Canada, mirroring what the US
has, from life plus 50 to life plus 70, arguing, kind of, against the ways in which
copyright reinforces industry concentration, what this means for smaller scale creators
in Canada,
and trying to advocate for things like rights reversion automatically taking place
after about 25 years. So you may have artists being able to then, you know, get their
rights back, license them directly, do something else with those rights, and
thinking more about, you know, communities sort of connected to ideas of publics, public
culture.
So we get into things like the creative commons and user rights and their relationship
to Canadian creativity, versus, sort of, the relationship between industry monopolies
and upholding what are very much repressive, a repressive copyright regime.
And the second one, it's more recent.
And this was sent to the Innovation, Science, Economic Development Canada Consultation
on the term extension itself. A lot of librarians and libraries were involved in this, very few
advocating for sort of the creative sector or musicians. And in this case, this is
more of a reaction to the fact that the term extension was going through and thinking about
ways to sort of mitigate the ill effects of that.
So that one's a little bit less based on music, but it also includes some,
some context with respect to Canadian musicians in COVID at the end there, and things
about the political economy of the Canadian music industries as well. I kind of liked
that idea about how to bridge communities and industries, and thinking about something
like the community radio sector or the campus community radio sector, which has its own
issues of sustainability.
You know, commercial stations are after those frequencies and what have you, but it
is a place where there is some support for, you know, not primarily commercial or market
driven examples of sharing music are able to circulate to some extent. And maybe
that is something that we could expand into other realms of the music industries potentially.
Maybe I'll just add something very quickly because everyone has spoken so eloquently
on this subject matter. I think there needs to be a delineation between industry
and community. And I want us to think about the implications of bringing them closer together.
And if we're thinking about the transformational, and this is a word that Christina brought
up, you know, maybe I can take a cue, from something that was recently tweeted
by Edmonton's former Poet Laureate and musician, Cadence Weapon.
And in this tweet, he reminds us that, like, the most significant radical, impactful,
social initiatives in Toronto over the past year were made possible by volunteers.
So backs hunters, tiny shelters, community fridges, encampment support network, you know,
there's a connection to be made here with music and the possibility of music operating
in transformative ways outside of industry frameworks and logics, which we know are primarily,
as we discussed, geared towards extraction and economic activity.
You know, these social initiatives that I listed happen outside and despite of industry,
and they're oriented towards an ethic of collective community care, and are not focused on wealth
accumulation. And this is not so much me trying to resolve anything, but add another dimension
to the conversation that we're having.
Thanks so much, everyone, for your really thoughtful exploration of these lines, and thanks Alanna
for bringing, like, the example of Jamaica, and the various refinements in this conversation
that we were having about this. I'm often struck by the ways that music, comparatively
a smaller part of the sort of, you know, entertainment sector of the economy,
again, I know that we're kind of pushing against this kind of economic framing of it, but.
I think the way that theorists have for many years, like even going back to like, Jacques
Attali writing in like 1989, talking about music as a harbinger of the future. And I
think of the ways that musicians are in, some ways, harbingers of the experience of neoliberal
life and some of the things that we're sort of teasing out here.
I want to leave a little space for the audience to engage and ask their own questions
and bring their thoughts to this conversation, so I want to think a little bit about, you
know, some of, you know, move our conversation, maybe a little bit more sort of future-oriented
as we've been, you know, many of us have been sort of pushing that conversation and thinking
about, you know, we were talking, I think Mark was the person who said, you know, how
do we wrap?
You know, where's the radical imagination here? So often in Canadian music policy,
I mean, we are so good at sort of mapping out what happens in terms of industry structures.
This is where the money comes from, so much of the money that the granting money goes
to support major labels and often major artists.
So there's, you know, we do end up with this very stratified way of thinking about, you
know, who's where the money is and who is participating in music cultures, and these
very extractive ways that so often policy and copyrights seem to work with, with musical
creativity. And so I guess the way I'll frame this question for the panel before we begin
to sort of invite conversations in from the audience, although we have plenty where questions
that we would love to talk about is,
maybe some examples from musicians and how musicians have sustained themselves. Again,
sustainability, the S word that we are kind of dancing around here in this panel. How
have musicians sustained themselves in the pandemic? Are there any examples or hopes going forward
with all the caveats that we've been listing?
We might also think about the ways that different sort of technological infrastructure and,
you know, human affordances, the bodies that are involved in doing this might limit those,
the potential of those things. You know, how might we think about reversing or pushing
against or resisting this extractive, you know, mode that shapes so many lives
involved in making music and, you know, so, so what kinds of paths forward might be imagined?
Have we seen in this extraordinary... yeah. You know, again, another
catastrophe on top of the music industry in many ways that the pandemic has brought. Where's
our hope, where's our, or maybe radical imagination might be the place.
I gotta think this one through. So one of y'all go first.
Just quickly, I mean, I may try to think through some more specific things too,
but it seems like there's been a heightened conversation or awareness around things like,
what an individual or an everyday sort of listener, what their kind of listening
habits or practices means for kind of a larger, ecosystem of music, for
lack of a better term.
And maybe the conversation is there seems to be a focus on having at least this
conversation about, this being an issue potentially at least over the last year.
I think there's been a spotlight on that.
I'll add something, excuse me, to the copyright conversation, which is not my specialty,
but Brian, maybe you have thoughts on this. I feel like there has to be a conversation
about public domain because Alanna, I loved what you said about music
coming out of communities. And then where do we see models of that then connecting to
industry?
And I should say that I don't see community and industry as separate at all. I think,
If that came across in my last comments, then I definitely misspoke.
What happens in community music is part of how we make money. In the, which to
me is part of an industry. And part of what happens in the field of making money
through music is working within community settings.
But public domain is often the tag that gets put on music
that comes out of communities. And I guess here, for me, I'm thinking really specifically
about the field of traditional music, which is where most of my research is. And the ways
that, say, a village in Quebec might have a set of some repertoire that comes
out of that location, fiddle tunes, or songs, for instance.
And that gets tagged as public domain. And then there's no money. That goes back
to that community, or to the individuals who have some, somebody wrote that music. It didn't
just appear out of the soil of the town centre, as much as we might imagine that it did.
So how does model money get funnelled back to groups of semi professionals or amateurs
who are making music and putting that music out into the world?
Because with public domain, it tends to not get back funnelled back. And I think
there's also, I think that public domain also connects to some of these questions we're
having around how, how the industry is, how racial inequity
and gender inequity work in the industry because, if we think about music that
comes out of amateur music making, that can be gendered, times if we think
about things like music from Indigenous communities, First Nations communities that was recorded,
and somehow then moves into the public domain.
And then you end up with copyright issues around, I don't even know. I don't
want to say copyright issues, I guess, sovereignty issues around whose music is this and what
does this get used for? But under copyright law, this is in the public domain. I don't
have an answer to this, but I feel like that's part of the question here.
I think it's also a question of resources, like Laura, when you're speaking about
artists or communities being remunerated for the music that they produce and create,
I mean, I just did my taxes and I forgot, I forgot to file at my T4. Like there
are all of these different systems that then get into play that, you know, then require
support, and, you know, guidance around how to then, you know, file your taxes
properly, and, you know, not have to pay the government back for something that you've
missed.
I would really love to see in Toronto, we have a library where, you
know, people can rent out tools, you know, they can rent out cooking equipment.
But it would be amazing if we had a place where people could go and borrow,
you know, a guitar or a music interface. And then, you know, be given resources on
how to use it.
Like just some sort of borrowing, um, infrastructure that requires no money that in some way is
institutionally supported by the government, that can get people with equipment, learning
different skills and perhaps providing opportunities that may not otherwise exist.
It's a very practical suggestion,
But I think that kind of practicality is useful
in the same way that community and industry can exist.
I think creativity and practicality, I think they both need each other. And I'm so
curious about the intersections of the different perspectives that have come up today. There's
so much that I want to say on how artists have sustained themselves, what the future
could look like. My initial, when I was thinking about this question, you know, singing,
we're not sustaining ourselves, we're sustaining society at the cost of ourselves, you know,
and there are people over the last year, and I don't want to take away from the hope.
There will be hope at the end of this. This answer would follow me. When I think about,
the Unreal Life, an initiative led by Simone Schmidt that is educating
musicians within the community about the systemic racism that led to the creation
of the music industry, nevermind the the systemic racism that emerges, covert and
overt forms of racism in the music industry, but the very racist foundation of
the music industry.
When I think about Club Quarantine, which Casey brought up, which is an online
club led by and created for the queer community. I think about my
own initiative Susu, which is a music in conversation series that's meant to bring
siloed music scenes together and to raise funds for mutual aid. You know, on the surface
of it, it looks like because we are artists presenting and sharing art, we are doing what
it is that we're supposed to do.
But what you don't see on the other end is that we do not get paid for this time that
we are impacted as greatly by the weight of some of the heavy conversations we're bringing,
to audiences. We are also experiencing the hurt that inspired the need for the
creation of these initiatives.
That's not, that's barely surviving, nevermind thriving, you know? And so, I don't know
that we are sustaining ourselves necessarily, but we are getting by, and because we
are artists and we share this creative output, society gets the benefit and can feel
good. And so the assumption is that we also feel good doing it, and that isn't always,
always the case, but I think going through the different cycles of,
of grief that has to do with realizing that your tours are canceled, that you've lost
money, that you're uncertain of your future
in that questioning. I know for myself, I've emerged with a new identity of what it means
to be an artist. There's my practice, and there's my career. I'm an artist. Whether
the industry collapses or not, I'm a vocalist. I don't need any infrastructure. I don't need
any instrumentation, I can sing. And I can, I create music simply with my voice,
right? And so, I think holding on to that power, that idea of a practice that can exist,
whether radio plays me or not, whether I'm signed or not, whether an audience shows
up to my show or not, that feeds me. That's not just a romantic notion. That is that,
that is a survival mechanism. But it's also a tenet of my identity.
I'm an artist, and that's something that I realized last year. But then, when I think
about my career, I think about the networks that I decide to participate in. I think about
the media outlets through which I decide to present my work. I think about the collaborators
that I want to collaborate with, and all of those are strategic moves, whether it's thinking
about the strategy of how to maintain my practice and the integrity of it, or whether it's thinking
about the economic advancement of my practice and turning it into an economically
viable part of my body of work.
I think about how those two, the relationship between my practice and
the career and that's, those are considerations that I've sat with as well. And
I don't know that I would have been able to, especially because of the fact that
I'm not 21. I'll tell you that right now. And I've been in the music industry for a
long time.
I came up in the music industry. So it, it was hard for me to shed that thinking,
you know, thinking like I know so many people in the music industry, I get music grants,
I understand music law, I'm set. I should make it. Why am I not making it? You know,
and all that questioning that that comes up.
And then last year, when I thought about the fact that there is no music industry to tap
into at the moment, what do I have left? I have my music practice, and I'm really good
at it. I'm just as dedicated to being a good artist as I am to being a good, music
business person. And so when I think about sustainability, going back, the idea
of maintaining myself, and the idea of, rather than thinking about maintaining something,
but dismantling something.
Last year, when I thought about maintaining my emotional health, it meant saying no, you
know, rather than taking on opportunities, thinking about my future and how saying
no to the wrong opportunities saved my emotional resources for myself and for my practice.
When I think about maintaining myself last year, rather than maintaining my
idea, what I think of is, as being an artist, actually Casey, your
reading--Casey shared a reading with me by Angela McRobbie, and there was a chapter
called the Romance of Being Creative, and how we create the illusion of having
a creative practice as if we're actually working when we're just like,
buying things to mask the fact that we don't really have money or not making money. Like,
we're kind of creating this illusion of like a romantic freewheeling, independent thinking
freelancer, when really it's just like work precarity, and we just eat really good
food and drink over overpriced cocktails.
So we look like we're thriving, but really we're just like getting by. So instead
of maintaining the illusion of what I consider a successful artists to be, I had to shed
that old identity. And all of these things, when I think about maintenance, what
if we had an opposite approach? What have we thought about the things that we shed that
weren't serving us?
And then we rebuild our idea of what a practice or a career could be. And that's been
what, hat's what my thinking has been over the last year. And so now, I'm
less afraid to speak on a panel and less afraid to dive deeper into academic work, because
I don't feel like it's separate from my music making.
This is all part of it. And I feel like I got very emotional in that last
bit. And so I guess if the takeaway would be, when I think about what it is that
I'm sustaining and maintaining and thinking about, I'm considering what it is that I need
to shed so that I can maintain myself.
And when I think about how artists are sustaining themselves, I think we still have
quite a ways to go. And we can't mistake sustaining society with artists sustaining
themselves, and we really have to consider the costs that it takes
for us to help the audience feel good.
Does that make sense? Am I making sense? Did you get something from that? Okay.
You're totally making sense. And this whole panel has made me question the localness and the
contingency of our definition of sustainability. And you know, I'm not well-versed in
Indigenous thought, but I know amongst the Iroquois Confederacy and this whole
notion, they have a notion of seven generations, which I'm told is Haudenosaunee.
When I learned it was created that many, many years ago. Anyhow, the idea, though, is
that, like, people take the responsibility to think about the next seven generations
that come after them, which, you know, while I don't know tons about that, when
we talk about sustainability in Western culture, it is not as robust, you know, as old
as we are,
we're just now starting to talk about mental health, so that sustainability never, ever
really included human sustainability, like our own health. It always meant
sustaining the economy. So, you know, I'm at a point in journeying through what
we mean by sustainability, wondering how deeply and how locally conceived,
there's this idea of sustainability, and what could we learn from folks that had sustained
the earth for thousands of years?
Because we don't ask questions about, if I build this car, what will happen in seven
generations? Will my, you know, will my great grandchildren live in a polluted earth?
Like, well, obviously the question is yes, but you know, Henry Ford wasn't asking that
when it was all about economy and sort of industry kind of thing.
So yeah, I'm venting, but I'm also just thinking out loud. Where we begin with
this conversation of sustainability needs to have, not just mental health, but wellness
at the very, very core of sustaining the earth and humanity, even if it has to be alongside
the economy and industry, which we can't seem to get away from.
Great. Yeah. Thanks so much. I think what we're really getting at is these things that
are sort of harder to get at, with sort of, like, the sort of polished policy levers that
we so often talk about. And that I think this, you know, like in many ways, you know, we
often talk about when we're teaching, say music industry or things like that.
And like these bigger questions, which I think is, you know, I returned to the fact that
like, we come to this panel as people who, you know, came to music because we loved it
and music as this form of human expression or human right. Or, you know, way of being
together in this world. And it's, you know, that, of course, is hard to get ahead with
all those sorts of lovers.
And I just really value it and continuing to think about everything that people have
been raising in this conversation, as wacky as it is to be doing in the land of boxes and
cyberspace. I'm looking at in the comments, and I'm seeing some questions coming in, and,
so there's, with a question about creative commons and platforms, which I think
is maybe where we were getting into, you know, like dancing around a little bit with our
conversation about copyright and public domain.
And then thanks Mary Elizabeth Luka, for your question about coming back to Mark's question
about the radical imagination, this is a much easier way of framing the question than you,
than, you know, I framed it, like, what would you, like, what would be a great environment
for music making in the next 10 years from now, we don't have to figure out how to get
there, which is lovely.
So, I would love to hear folks' thoughts on the panel about, you know, what do we want
to get to? And if you have thoughts about creative commons, that would be delightful
as well.
Oh, well thinking too of like an, as I was saying, like, you know, elaborate a bit
on my question there, because I think I was a little bit more thinking about it in part
inspired by maybe some of the other panelists and stuff that's been discussed at this conference,
you know, from even things concerning, like, Bill C-10-esque ideas and Canadian content
platforms, issues around that.
Then the two main things I was wondering about is, so then if you're familiar with, I'll
just put links quickly in here, these kind of services or these platforms you could say,
and then speaking in this kind of, like, in COVID context, and what I feel like will be
a kind of post-COVID context with people being more comfortable with using digital platforms
as we've been kind of used to recently.
So just the two platforms here, this like Musiversal, and that's Fiver,
so maybe people are more familiar with Fiver, but so, you know, these kinds of services,
and there's various other ones like Musiversal, where you can, you know, have not sure,
but say like five music, like you can get your string quartet, like you're making even
something for TV or theater or something, and you get a string quartet, or you're making
a, you know, your original compositions, you send them sheet music, then it's like, you
have this zoom call where.
I don't know if there's like a DAW-like recorder built in or how it works, but you can, as if
you'd be going into a studio with various musicians. And so that would be a big issue.
You know, if you're a session musician and you were doing stuff like, you know, three
days a week, no problem, or more, and then now you might be down to zero.
So using these kinds of platforms that allows these people to, you know, continue doing
that and then Fiver, again, you could hire people. But then as I was asking about,
creative commons, I just find that is a very interesting question around the idea,
like say folk music, how you can, in like, a post-Spotify world or something, like make
money off of music that is kind of creative commons or lacks copyright, and a certain
freedom, you know. It's important maybe to have it be like, you know, keep that folk
kind of tradition.
But I find an important thing similar to say, like artworks that are kind of creative commons
and various things. It's like the person who, actually though, takes their, like, Hustle Blood
camera and goes to a gallery or a statue and takes that, you know, difficult to make
photo. And then they sell that photo, you know?
So I'm just wondering what the things I just explained, like the platforms and how,
kind of continuing on how you were discussing that creative commons. The idea that, for instance,
you know, like shows would be a big part, is that you have these very old traditional things,
but then you'd have even these,
well, I'm more from the Windsor area in Canada here, but you know, you have like Corn Fest,
Strawberry Fest, and like five other harvest oriented festivals, like every year, like
in Leamington, Windsor, Chatham, this. So you have people who it's like, they make their
yearly income go into like 10 festivals in like two months, you know?
And you have your income just from doing that. Yeah. So I was just thinking that, to
what your ideas on platforms like this slash, and maybe the other question from Mary, how
that would look in the future slash near future to have. And if you have other models and
Alanna, if you're saying you have models like this platform, but platforms that could maybe
have decentralized networks, CanCon rules, whatever, that would integrate the stuff I
was talking about slash moving forward and helping them with the stuff we're talking
about.
So that's the question.
Yeah that's a, that's a big question. So I'm looking at these platforms and they
look like ways to sort of, you know, get session musicians, which is a, a long standing
practice in the industry. And, you know, there's a lot of questions about, you know, fair pay,
intellectual property, and labor coming out of those.
But yes, I feel like people in this panel will have a lot to say, so I'm going to get
out of the way.
I will say that Musiversal went, as soon as I see that design aesthetic, I'm like, that's
not for me. When I see a site where it's like many quotables by somebody, it feels
very, I see something that utilitarian, I think it's useful. I think
it's an intelligent idea. I think it could be a possible solution,
although my experience in voice work, I find that even in the industry, those personal
relationships are very important. And so to have kind of like, a baseless working
relationship, I don't know, I'd be concerned about the quality of the music and
the quality of the musical experience that comes from it.
I think that people would have the technical capabilities, but I think that interpersonal
relationship is very important in creating community music. And so that's where these
platforms, I feel, fall short. I think that, if I were treating it as a job, that it
would be useful almost like seeing it as a job board.
But yeah, I dunno. It's, it's kind of, I have an intuitive reaction
to that. So it's hard for me to articulate. It's not necessarily off-putting.
I know that I'm critiquing this particular platform rather than the whole idea that you're
getting at is like, what are new models of sustainability?
What are ways of soliciting music services in face of certain limitations that
we have even spatial limitations, considering that we're in a pandemic and can't be in the
same room and can't network. This is a way that you can connect with different musicians.
But it also makes me curious about what would the actual musical outcome be of
this kind of collaborative working relationship, and that, just the kind of,
kind of romantic artists, you know, that I would hesitate,
I would hesitate to create music through this platform, but it does get me thinking
about, okay, well, how do we, how do we create those connections? How do we build a
personal relationship if that is the way through what you like to communicate, but at the same
time, recognize the need for work and recognize the limitations and being able
to network, et cetera.
But on a simple level, I feel like Instagram has actually been quite useful for that. I've
seen many collaborations pop up through people who have a chance to go to someone's
Instagram page. And it sounds kind of basic. It's like, it's just Instagram. Everybody
has access to that. Everybody has an Instagram account, but you can, at the very least, even
if it's on a superficial level, get a sense of,
what are the allegiances that these people are communicating through their aesthetic?
What's the community that they're rolling with? Does it align with your own personal
value system or your own musical interests? You can get samples of their music. You
can engage with them in conversation and DM, and then you're building these kinds of
micro-communities.
And then that may or may not lead to collaboration. And I've seen that happen, and that feels
a little bit less, I don't want to be insulting, sterile is too severe a word, but I just
think that that is a way that you can engage in outreach and expand your network
in a way that could lead to work.
But it's on the basis of establishing a relationship, which I think creates more meaningful music,
or at least something that feels good because it's less pastiche. You know, you have an
idea, you have a way of, there's a little bit more back and forth, and that negotiation
of ideas is where I think the most interesting, creativity emerges from.
So I'd be curious to see, to explore, Musiversal, to see
if there's an opportunity to engage with the people and not just their services as
well.
Yeah, I think, see, because that's where I think the aspect that you're sensing and
focusing on with Musiversal that, yeah, can seem off-putting is that like, it seems to
be more this almost roster system, or it's kind of like an almost, we're getting problematic
record label issues.
Kind of. There were times where it's like, they'll have their eight kind of people with
their headshots and all their stuff. So it's like, oh, if you need a drummer, you could
choose from these three drummers and stuff like that, as opposed to more of a social
seeming, you know, platform, and then, 'cause that's what I was kind of wondering, almost
a bit of a hybrid approach that I think you're a really emphasizing there with
Instagram, is that a way to kind of advantage from, well, cause then, for instance,
like, certain issues maybe with Instagram, you know, is then we can get into larger kind
of, basically problematic use of algorithms and data privacy and integrating
like, you know, for profit advertising models, into cultural musical production at every
level, you know. So that every bit of data you send through, you know, the Amazon web
server will create, you know, revenue for whatever.
So, and that's what I was kind of emphasizing. I think definitely what you're saying, but
then focusing on maybe this like decentralized network stuff where, you know, you could integrate
those. And then maybe you would almost look closer to like something like Bumble or something
like, almost closer to like a dating app, or something, but without certain larger data
implications.
Thanks so much, Steven. You know, I think we have a few, like three more minutes left
in the panel and I'd love to give our panelists like 30 seconds to 60 seconds say anything,
summative that they would like to say.
I'll start very quickly. I'm going to put a link
in the chat to this special issue that I co-edited, because the editorial at the
last section of the editorial is what we call the non policy section
for those of you who are interested in policy, but we're looking through
all, these special issues include, largely, non-academic writers. So there's like
contributions from, I don't know, 50 to 60 people from the industry and musicians,
agents, festival directors, so on, and we're trying to sum up some of the ideas.
There's so many ideas that come out of their writings. So that's the non-policy section
there. So there's some great ideas. I'll put that out. And my other dream for 10
years from now is, I don't know, it's universal basic income or something like what
happens in France for artists on their days off.
They actually get paid like some kind of unemployment, but some kind of sustainable financial
structure like that. And, pipe dream here, that when we hire our local musicians,
we pay them as much as we pay the out of town musicians so that you don't have to travel
all over the place to make the same amount of money. Okay, I'll pass it onto the next person.
Thanks for that, Laura. I want to wrap up by answering Emmy's, you know, 10 years
from now. If I was to radically imagine what this space could look like, I think
as radical as I could imagine is having elders from different diasporas be at the policy
table with young people where, you know, you might learn about a grandmother from Somalia
or a grandmother from Sri Lanka explaining how they sustain their musical career and
their love for music and bring that to bear on what kinds of decisions, because I feel
like the conversation,
it's not complete if it's not intergenerational, multi-sectoral, and outside of academia, as
well as, you know, including scholars and practicing musicians. So that's my 10
year dream.
Maybe I can add a dream for the summer or next year. I hope we can get
out of our houses and get in the room together because there's nothing, there's nothing that
replaces the affect of charge of being at a show,
playing with musicians and friends in the same room. You know, I have a three-year-old
son that is very into MIA and Frozen, and his experience of music has been limited to
screens. And I would love nothing more for him and his pals to see a show outside
in a park or at a concert venue again. So I'm hoping for a, you know, a healthier,
safer world, and yeah, that's very, you know, idealist right now, but that's actually
what I'm hoping for.
I guess I agree with all those excellent points. And I think one thing I would just add to
that too is potentially getting, if we're thinking about the role of the internet and
digital spaces, getting to a place where we can think about that as not being connected
to corporations so much, you know, we're thinking about platforms, Instagram, Spotify,
it's hard to imagine an internet that doesn't have those connections, even though the technologies
themselves should allow for more direct relationships between artists and fans, and maybe compensation
starts to play out across those lines where people are less dependent on a restricted
set of structures.
And it's less about slimming percentages to artists and more about a, more substantial
payments so that people can explore creativity in a wide variety of ways, and kind
of using technology to its fullest potential,
I mean, I would love for this to happen now. Speaking specifically about
musicians and artists, but this applies to everyone is, I would love universal basic income
to recognize the value that we're contributing to society. And that we don't
have to continually have to prove our contributions in quantitative data, but that the pandemic
can highlight the initiatives that we've contributed in upholding society
and that we can be compensated accordingly so that, you know, we can continue to do what
we're doing.
We can create, we can inspire, we can comfort, we can challenge, but in a way that
doesn't completely deplete us. And so that we can make creative decisions, not based
on chasing money or the compromises attached to certain kinds of money, but that we can,
make creative decisions for the purpose of making a strong... musical practices
as we can.
And I would say that I dream of a Canada where we don't have to leave to go to the
States or Europe to be signed or to be promoted or for our music to be recognized,
that we have a Canadian music industry or community that recognizes the innovation
that we have within this country and that we value new ideas and that we're less
risk averse.
Because we already have the, we already have the ingredients, we just need to support
what it is that we have.
Amazing. Thank you so much, panelists. This was, you know, Mark Laura, Brian, Casey,
and Allana. I love the vision of all musicians with UBI, actually all people with UBI, to
be honest, elders at the table, getting to not, not having to leave and travel, taking
some of the lift of touring off, which has been, become such an important way for musicians
to make a living.
And it's so hard on so many people, and then an internet without corporate domination.
So we're just, very simple, very simple requests, but I really love this world that we're
imagining, and please do check out the fabulous work that folks are doing in their
scholarship, in their music, making in their engagement with the community, and thanks to
everybody.
So thanks for coming and thanks to the panelists, this was a great conversation.