Good morning. My name is Greg Johnston, and I currently serve as one of two vice-presidents on the board of the Songwriters Association of Canada. On behalf of the S.A.C., I'd like to express our thanks for the invitation and opportunity to speak with you this morning.
The S.A.C. is a registered national arts service organization with approximately 1,500 members dedicated to educating, assisting, and representing Canadian songwriters. An association run by accomplished and active writers, the S.A.C. is committed to the development and recognition of Canadian songwriters by pursuing: their right to benefit from and receive fair compensation for the use of their work; the advancement of the craft and enterprise of songwriting through educational programs, networking opportunities, dissemination of business knowledge, and other services; and the development of activities that allow members to reach out and enjoy the sense of community shared by songwriters.
The board of accomplished songwriter-directors of the S.A.C. is drawn from across Canada. The association works in cooperation with and supports regional associations across the country.
In the context of this committee's work to study the state of the Canadian music industry, I believe it is of great importance to define who we are as songwriters. We are entrepreneurs. We are self-employed. We are artists. Some of us are performers as well, but a great many of us are not. We work mostly behind the scenes utilizing our talent, wisdom, experience, and skill to build the foundation of the music business—the song. Socio-economically we are a diverse community. A great deal of us are, like myself, middle class. We raise families, pay taxes, participate in our communities, and are essential to the music industry.
Canadians are highly successful exporters of music, but it is important to remember that although the record labels and performers are the face of this success, it all starts with a song. Songwriters are in essence the raw material of the industry. I make this point to illustrate the uniqueness of our place within the business. Our challenges, our successes, our needs, and our concerns are better understood when one first recognizes songwriters as a distinct and autonomous sector within the music industry.
We at the S.A.C. also believe it is important to examine the economic influence of the songwriter-publisher, or creator, side of the business as it compares to the record label-performer, or maker, side of the business. In the end, it was probably Mr. Reynolds, former president of Universal Music Canada, who best stated the conundrum when he expressed the view that establishing the relative value of the authors' and performers' contribution in a successful recording was the classic chicken-and-egg situation. He didn't think you could extricate the two to say one was more important than the other.
Recently the S.A.C. has joined the ACCORD group representing almost all Canadian songwriters and publishers through their unions and associations. Research is being carried out on the contribution of the ACCORD community to the Canadian economy, and although the study is incomplete, it is clear that the songwriter contribution is roughly the same as that of the Canadian record labels, both major and independent, according to the CIMA and Music Canada studies.
Considering the current state of the industry, we at the S.A.C. know that the ability of songwriters to earn a living is in jeopardy. Over a decade of escalating unauthorized uses of our works has eroded the royalty stream we rely on almost exclusively as income. The hardest hit will be the songwriting middle class, the group that is undeniably the engine of the sector. Although pundits and experts alike expect new streaming models of music consumption to reach the $40-billion mark globally within five years, creators must be represented fairly in the value chain. When artists like Zoë Keating are reporting 2013 Spotify earnings of $808 from 201,402 streams, it becomes apparent that there is still much work to do on the sustainability of the streaming model.
We ask the Government of Canada to support the Songwriters Association of Canada in our efforts to research and establish guidelines for fair compensation for songwriters in regard to new digital models. We must do all that we can to ensure that individual Canadian music creators receive a fair share of the new and growing revenue streams that without our work would not exist.
Jean-Robert.