Thank you so much, and again, thanks for inviting me here today. Honestly, I was surprised to get the call, but I'm happy to give my thoughts on a number of different fronts and I'll try and stay within the eight minutes.
The first thing I want to touch on, which has really been a topic over the last few years, is the demise of the record industry and how that affects live music. The one thing I have noticed is that with the demise of the record industry, live music has actually proliferated more than ever, which is kind of odd because we hear so much about the fact that people can get their music for free. They download the music and people aren't buying records anymore. Well, if there were a typical supply-and-demand relationship, that would have led to less music being created. In fact, the opposite has happened. More music is being created. More music is being watched and listened to, and more people are going out to see live music. That is kind of an odd thing, given all of that. My observation is that the demise of the record industry is really about the demise of the recording executive industry, not really about music, and 95% to 99% of musicians, are still making about the same.
Why is music becoming more popular? One thing I would argue is that there are so many events, and today I'm going to touch on the notion of not-for-profit music events because that's who I represent. The RBC Bluesfest is a not-for-profit and almost every festival across Canada is a not-for-profit event. There's a big distinction between that and a for-profit event. I'll mention that five to 10 years ago, really, the market in Canada shifted from concerts to more what I call “destination music” events. Destination music events are large-scale music events that attract tourism and large numbers of people to different communities.
Those destination music events, I would argue, are events like the Montreal Jazz Festival, the RBC Bluesfest, and the Festival d'été in Quebec City. All these events have been tremendously successful over the last 10 years, for a number of reasons. One reason is that they've been supported in large part by government, but also that there has been a huge interest in music, and the things that these not-for-profit events have been able to do have had a huge impact. We're a member of FAME, Festival and Major Events Canada. There are 15 of us right now and that list is growing, but the economic impact of the 15 FAME members is $1.1 billion to the economy. These organizations are making a huge impact.
One argument and one question maybe is, what is important about a not-for-profit music event, and why do we merit support from different levels of government? One of the main things we do is encourage the proliferation of non-commercial music. For instance, the Montreal Jazz Festival or the Festival d'été in Quebec City spend probably a million dollars on non-gated events. These are events that are free to the public, and many of those events have the biggest impact. The Festival d'été sells a 10-day, 200-act event passport for roughly $70, and for that $70 you can not only go and see Metallica and Bon Jovi, but you can also see phenomenal Canadian artists, ethnic and cultural artists, and street performers. They sell a hundred thousand of those passes, and the only reason they sell them is that the passes can be a huge deal. One of the ways they can do that is by using the public funding they received to do the important things they need to do to generate that impact.
We in fact spend $200,000 on local artists. Those local artists don't really contribute to the people who are buying tickets to the event, but they contribute tremendously to the community. One thing I would note is that with a for-profit enterprise, the general goal is to maximize shareholder value. Well, not-for-profit companies don't do that. Not-for-profit companies maximize community value and that is the biggest difference between those two organizations. We do things like employ many local artists, non-commercial artists, who appear alongside commercial artists and who therefore gain a broader audience.
At the end of the day the question is, what should Heritage should be doing to support the live music industry in Canada? I think the argument that I would make is that it's time to really take an inventory of where the money is going. I think the not-for-profits make a huge impact but there also has to be accountability.
So it's not just music for music's sake. What is the impact these funds are making and what does each organization use the funds for? At the end of the day, there has to be accountability on the money that we're receiving and what the impact is in the community. That also has a huge impact on the tourism community and industry.
Those really are the several points that I'd like to make today. I'm open to questions and thank you very much for entertaining me.