If you read the newspaper, you're probably aware that the entire recording side of the music industry has been in a tailspin for the last five or six years because of the digital downloads and the whole phenomenon of the Internet. In traditional retail, we're seeing bankruptcies in distributors, retail stores, and labels. Major labels have been firing wholesale and going back to being marketing companies.
An interesting phenomenon is that a lot of the responsibility for artist development has fallen back on the artists themselves. One of the areas of development that artists and independent labels can use is online digital music that can be sold legitimately through iTunes, subscription services, and mobile downloads around the world.
This is a new model that is just growing now. We isolated this as a specific need for the music industry—to try to grow the ability of the music industry to develop digital music, digital sales, and digital marketing. This would help replace all the traditional sales that have been lost over the last five to six years. We're talking billions and billions of dollars in sales losses, with 70,000 firings in major labels in North America. It's been devastating. Having this funding right now is a recognition that we need to move forward and embrace the new technology. But we need some help.
We feel that this issue of the Canadian music diversity fund has been pitted against the digital and the export. We're comparing apples and oranges. It's a shame that a press release said that we were taking money from Canadian music diversity and giving it to the industry for digital and export marketing. It pitted the industry against the non-traditional community, which we just don't accept. We're not in competition. We embrace the non-commercial community. It's just a shame that this happened. But the need is real, it's now, and support for digital music is essential.