I ♥ Canadians

By the time the telecast started, many of my favourite albums of 2009 had already won Junos: Bell Orchestre for instrumental album of the year (As Seen Through Windows), Charles Spearin for contemporary jazz album of the year (The Happiness Project), Billy Talent for rock album of the year (III), and K’naan for artist of the year. After decades of grumbling about the Junos, this was the first year I was predisposed to genuinely enjoy them. 

And yet they disappointed again—not because they were awful, but because they weren’t. Normally they are a combination of the painful and the ever-so-slightly profound, thanks to the cheap commercialization and the glimpses of comparatively obscure artists getting a shot in prime time. If we’re lucky, someone makes a decent speech. The 2010 Junos, by comparison, were like lithium: no highs, no lows, just even keel.

Amanda Ash over at The Indie Files got a chance to attend The Cultch’s IGNITE! Mentorship Program.  After she spoke on a panel about media relations in the arts, she met the future of Canadian music:

These kids, ranging from spoken word gurus to songwriting superstars to drama queens to dancing kings, are quite talented. I later got the chance to sit in a group with just the songwriters and talk to them in-depth about the music industry, music journalism and music in general. It is moments like these that make me frustrated to hear about funding cuts to the arts. There are some truly talented and devoted teens who are eager to make music a career, but the reality is that’s going to be more and more difficult in coming years.

The above photo is what the future of Canadian music looks like. Doesn’t it look spectacular? I think so!

A great essay by the 2010 Polaris Music Prize winners, Fucked Up, is posted on their blog, which goes deep into the music industry economic system, particularly that of the annual SxSW festival.

This is important for a lot of reasons, all of which have to do with you as an economic actor. Something that should be forefront in the minds of every band and every record label is how this is the most visual example of music money leaching away from the people most connected to music. You may have heard that the music industry is sort of falling apart. It isn’t really a matter of there being less money in the pool - just that the money people have to spend on entertainment (which will always be somewhat of a constant) is just being diverted away from where it historically has gone (record labels and managers). The music industry is by definition an operation invented to divert money spent on music away from actual musicians - the problems that the music industry is currently facing have specifically to do with the fact that the money that would usually flow directly to the bigger economic actors is now going somewhere else.

Here are the nominees for the 2010 Juno Awards.  From the Juno Awards website:

Each year, artists across Canada submit their best work for consideration in to 39 categories. This year, CARAS (Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) received the highest number of submissions in the awards history. To facilitate the nominating & voting process, CARAS works year round to ensure the process remains credible and is inclusive of many genres within Canada.

RightsFlow, a leading provider of bulk mechanical licensing and royalty services, announced a deal to handle Canadian royalty reporting for Amie Street, the fast growing online digital music retailer with a one-of-a-kind demand based pricing system.

The outcry occurred after Google’s blogging service, Blogger, shut down a number of music blogs, claiming that the files posted on the sites violated its terms of services. Among the blogs affected were I Rock Cleveland, It’s a Rap, LivingEars and Pop Tarts Suck Toasted. 

Google has since explained the closures, writing in a statement, “When we receive multiple DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.”

Montreal band Metric and Alexisonfire from St. Catharines, Ont., have each scored four nominations for the Annual Independent Music Awards.

The awards, to be given this March during Canadian Music Week in Toronto, honour achievements of Canadian and international artists in the independent music sector.

Montreal has reigned supreme as the Canadian independent music capital, but the Maritimes may be taking that title soon enough!

The Maritimes may not have been called “the most influential music scene in American music” lately, but the music scene emerging from the East Coast of Canada is still one of the most interesting, innovative and refreshing movements at work. But it didn’t just happen. The east coast has been building a reputation as an artistic powerhouse for years.

Basically, things have been tighter in the Justice Department since Obama has been in office, but the merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation is both ethically right, and morally wrong.

The Justice Department’s trustbusters argue that there was little else they could do. They could be right. There was a risk that Live Nation would sell its ticket service if the merger was blocked and simply sign a contract with Ticketmaster.