I'm glad the committee's going to look at the living conditions of artists, but we have to be realistic here. Some artists will just never make a living, some will become enormously rich and live in castles in Switzerland, and there's not much the system can do to even that out. I don't think we would want to try. That's the way they used to do things in Russia. We don't want to do that here.
A lot of the best-known serious music composers in Canada whom you would all know about earn less than $10,000 a year from copyright royalties. I know that; I work in this system. A lot of them earn less than $100 a year from copyright royalties. Getting played a few more times on CBC is not going to make a difference for those people. It's totally unrealistic to think that you can make a whole bunch of careers happen by opening up Radio 2 to everybody who says they want to be a songwriter or the next “Idol”. I think you have to be very realistic about what Radio 2 can do and what it can't do.
What we do know is that the serious music establishment has depended on it for decades and will be lost without it, whereas the rest of the things we've been hearing about are doing really well. You know, it's a more than $1-billion-a-year industry.