Thank you.
Good morning, Mr. Chair, and thank you for your invitation to appear before you today with regard to the specialized music sound recording program and the specialized music distribution program of the Canada Council for the Arts.
I'm Carol Bream, director of communications, and my colleague Russell Kelley is head of the music section.
Music is one of the seven main artistic disciplines the council invests in through a range of programs. The other disciplines are dance, theatre, visual arts, media arts, writing and publishing, and interdisciplinary arts.
The Canada Council's programs are peer-assessed, and in 2008-09 the Canada Council used over 800 peers for this purpose. Our grants totaled about $144 million, and we gave 6,200 grants to professional arts organizations and individual professional artists.
I will begin with an overview of the activities of the Council's Music Section. My colleague will then describe the sound recording programs that we have been administering since 1986 on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage. He will then speak to the impact that the changes announced recently by the department will have on the musicians in whom the council invests.
The Music Section invests in the creation, production and dissemination of Canadian music, as well as in the development of individuals, groups, small ensembles, orchestras, opera companies and other professionals in the Canadian music community.
Particularly relevant to our meeting today, the Music Section has managed a program for sound recording development on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage for 23 years. This program funded sound recordings in a number of genres, most notably in jazz, folk, world music and Canadian contemporary classical music. We learned on July 30 of this year that, after more than two decades, the memorandum of understanding would not be renewed and that the opportunities offered to the specialized music sector might disappear or be significantly reduced under the revamped Canada Music Fund.
Our preliminary analysis of the new Canada Music Fund appears to support the view that many musicians in jazz, folk, world music and contemporary classical music may no longer have access to sound recording support at the federal level. Meanwhile, provincial support for sound recording is uneven.
The specialized music sound recording and distribution programs of the Canada Council for the Arts resulted in over 94 CDs per year and supported leading-edge creation in a wide range of genres by professional musicians who use recordings as key business tools for finding work and audiences, both in Canada and abroad.
There is a key difference between the Canada council 's approach and the industry approach, which values the profit potential of a recording. For the musicians who receive funding from our programs, a recording is a business tool. But it may or may not eventually be profitable in the same way or at the same level as FACTOR or MUSICACTION define this concept in relation to the important programs that they deliver.
Artists in whom the Canada Council for the Arts has invested are the backbone of the many summer festivals in jazz, folk, world music and chamber music that are so popular with audiences across Canada.
Russell Kelley, head of music, will speak about the music ecosystem in Canada and about the potential impact of the changes to the Canada Music Fund on musicians in whom the council has invested over the past two decades.
Russell, the floor is yours.