Evidence of meeting #16 for Canadian Heritage in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was artists.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
What's the government's role in that?
12:30 p.m.
Director, Canadian Content Development and Industry Relations, SiriusXM Canada
Probably to regulate all that. As a broadcaster in Canada we take the responsibility for doing it and we've taken huge pride in doing it, but we don't all do. We don't all have those Canadian requirements.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
Thank you.
Ms. Thomas.
12:30 p.m.
Managing Director, Canada, Songza
As you requested I'm doing this with the filter of without monetary support, but if everyone could take the personal initiative to understand this digital music growth in Canada, understand the platforms, download the apps, look at how it is integrating with the Canadian culture and with the Canadian artists, and the platform it's allowing the Canadian artists to flourish on.... We do not have the limitations of formats. We represent all formats. We can come up with Canadian situations. Burton Cummings just did an entire “A Road Trip Through Canada” playlist for us with all his favourite artists on the playlist. He created it himself.
I think speeding up the Copyright Board. That doesn't cost any money. We really need to focus on.... The digital space changes every three weeks and with a period of four to five years to get a resolution, you can't function in that environment as a company or as an investor looking to invest in those kinds of companies.
As terrestrial radio gets narrower and limitations are put on it to get narrower in the formats, again the spillover will go to the digital platform to showcase these Canadian artists. So understanding the space, looking at other countries and seeing how they've developed and grown, the percentage of revenues going to artists in our country versus other countries is very important knowledge to have when making all of these decisions.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
You mentioned education. What can the federal government do to help schoolchildren learn more about Canadian artists?
12:30 p.m.
Director, Canadian Content Development and Industry Relations, SiriusXM Canada
A number of associations and organizations, including MusiCounts, are already in place. What MusiCounts does, and what is probably the best way to do it, is it awards grants to schools.
Students are present when the grants are awarded, and time is taken to introduce them to a Canadian artist. That artist has a chance to speak with the students, regardless of his or her musical style. The students are directly exposed to that type of music and given a chance to meet an artist following his or her performance. I think that is fundamentally important.
We also explain the complexity of the music industry and today's culture. There are so many ways to access culture that young people probably have no idea what that represents. The best way to do it is to provide it to them through very specific programs. We also present artists who tell them about their experience.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gord Brown
I am sorry, Mr. Weston, but your time is up.
Mr. Nantel, you have the floor. You have seven minutes.
12:30 p.m.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for being here this morning. This is very important for us and we appreciate the time you are giving us.
Good morning, Ms. Thomas.
I want to show some enthusiasm about the fact the SiriusXM people are here. I don't want to take too much time for my introduction as too often happens.
When you entered the market, André di Cesare was doing programming work for you in Montreal and headed up the team there. I remember that the record industry took a cautious view of satellite radio at the time. You have clearly done exceptionally well, first of all by improving your business's performance and visibility. Your support is also remarkable.
How has your revenue grown? How is your company doing?
12:35 p.m.
Paul Cunningham Vice-President, SiriusXM Canada
Financially we've grown the business dramatically over the last eight years. We have about $280 million of revenue. I think we have an EBITA of approximately $68 million for the last year. We've made it profitable and we've worked hard at it.
To answer the question you had of what the government can do, if you put out a fair and equal playing field when it comes to Canadian content and the Canadian CCD rules to everybody, everybody should be able to survive in that environment. If you can't make money, then raise your price. We offer a service today that's $15.99. If you want to get Internet you pay $4 more a month if you're an existing subscriber. If you're a stand-alone subscriber you would pay $15.99. We do that because we have to be profitable. We're a publicly traded company and we need to grow. We've done that within the guidelines of Canadian content and also contributing over $70 million in CCD funding in the last eight years.
12:35 p.m.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
Mr. Cunningham, I would like everyone here to know the following.
You raise the profile of Canadian artists around the world in the same way the Volu.me people try to do it for Canadian artists on the new platforms that reach out to the entire world beyond our borders. French-speaking Quebec artists who happen to have access to a potential market are obviously a special case. They may represent a small percentage, but this is an enormous market, as in Illinois, for example.
That is what we must ultimately aim for. I was going to ask Mr. Cooper what he thought of the National Film Board's initiative to embed its own app on Samsung or LG television sets; I don't know which it is.
Earlier people told us there were no simple solutions. However, some very promising things are in the offing, such as what you are doing.
Do you believe the NFB has played its cards right?
12:35 p.m.
President and Co-Founder, Volu.me
The thing to mention about apps is basically that they're only as effective as the user who wants to use the app and how engaged they get with the app. One of the questions we get often is from record labels that come to us and they want to put out a record label app that has all of their artists from within their roster. Right away we drew a line in the sand saying, no, we wouldn't do that. The reason for this is that artists' relationships with their fans are considered very precious to them. An artist doesn't want to send their fan to a place where they're going up against other artists. They can go down other rabbit holes.
I think the same thing, unfortunately, doesn't work for a lot of like the National Film Board apps and stuff like that, because they failed to really engage the end user to make the app a part of their lives. If you simply install an app once and you put it on your phone and then you forget about it, most apps are going to fail to call you back into the app. So some of the ways with artists that we try to get around that are we look at the context of the person. So say I'm in Ottawa today. If The Sheepdogs announce a concert that's within 300 kilometres of me right now, I'm going to get a push notification specifically about the ticketing for that specific event, whereas if I was in Vancouver I wouldn't get bothered with that information. Unfortunately, if you don't have those handles to really engage the end user, the app dies often on the tree.
12:35 p.m.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
This is so fresh and technological and new. It's very pertinent for us to hear.
I wanted to ask a question because we've been mentioning level playing fields.
So to Ms. Thomas, when you are asking for a quicker response from the Copyright Board, etc., I think that if the IFPI reports we've been hearing about are right, we are talking about the fact that in the business almost 80% of song consumption will go through streaming. So what is that level playing field according to you?
I've seen actually.... I referred to Songza, to Deezer on this French initiative that they have—I'm sorry, it is your initiative. So it's great for visibility, but what about this contribution to support Canadian artists money-wise?
12:40 p.m.
Managing Director, Canada, Songza
Are you referring to Canadian content regulation or...? I'm unclear on the question.
12:40 p.m.
Managing Director, Canada, Songza
Right. At this point if we took out all the Canadian-only playlists within our system, I think at least 10% of our roster is Canadian content only, Canadian playlists, supporting Canadian artists.
Obviously, we are dedicated and committed to being here. We have opened an office here. We have hired an entire staff here and curators to get into the emerging Canadian artists across all formats. We're working very closely with CIMA and the record labels to make sure we're uncovering all of that talent.
As to a level playing field, I can't really speak to that in terms of regulation or Canadian content rules or percentages. I'm sure we're at the percentage we're supposed to be. However, if that's what everybody considers a level playing field, then I'm sure our company would be happy to play in that.
In terms of the lag with the Copyright Board you referenced, a level playing field in line with other countries that can turn those regulations around in 12 months, so you can actually have predictability in building your business and having your investors invest in your business to grow, I think, would help. That's more of a global playing field.
12:40 p.m.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
That's exactly it: investing, taking all the opportunities as satellite radio has done. If we want our artists and our culture to be part of this new phenomenon, we need to address it and invest our full attention on making sure everybody's happy, and making good money, and that there's good exposure for our artists.
Thank you.
12:40 p.m.
Managing Director, Canada, Songza
True, and in terms of investing in particular initiatives with the music industry, we are supporting all of the festivals by creating curated playlists for the festivals and pushing that content out with Festival d'été, with Luminato, with North by Northeast, and various other ones this year, particularly around the music festivals from east to west and in Quebec.
So in terms of supporting content, we're doing that at this point, but we're four months in on a Canadian office. We'll get more ingrained in the music counts, I know, and I'm hoping to be on the CARAS board next year.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gord Brown
Thank you very much.
Mr. Dion, you have the floor for seven minutes.
12:40 p.m.
Liberal
Stéphane Dion Liberal Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Madame Thomas, Mr. Cooper, Madame Sasseville, Mr. Cunningham, thank you so much for being with us.
I'll ask you to participate in a little exercise. All of you spoke very fast. In reading your text, you had a lot to say. What was interesting was all of you came with recommendations.
May I ask you to repeat only your recommendations, listing them by priority and saying if they will be costly or not for the government to do so?
Mr. Cooper, you may start.
12:40 p.m.
President and Co-Founder, Volu.me
The first recommendation I had was more so just a change, an update, on how the FACTOR and Musicaction collective initiative programs work. Right now the maximum per program application is essentially $50,000 that's matched by our company. We receive $50,000 from FACTOR, and we match that with another $50,000 on our part.
The problem with that is it has helped us to augment our development, but realistically, without private investment from angel investors, industry veterans, we would have never been able to build what we have built.
The second part is simply on the matching for venture capital funding. We have a lack of venture capital in this country. We keep losing awesome technology platforms to the U.S. because they are forced to go there to receive the funding they need at scale. If the government could come in and essentially match when a Canadian venture capital firm is investing in a technology in music, specifically platform, it's a good way to vet essentially market acceptance for the product based on what the VC is willing to put in with their own money.
12:40 p.m.
Liberal
Stéphane Dion Liberal Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, QC
[Inaudible--Editor]...is more costly in the first stage.
12:40 p.m.
Liberal