Look, we are in an incredible transitional period. The recorded music industry has had to face new barriers. We've had to rethink how we're doing things. In terms of the great panacea promise of “Tour, tour, tour—you'll make your money on t-shirts and shows”, there is truth to that. It's what musicians have always done. They've always released a record, toured, and had income from there.
In Mr. Monahan's remarks yesterday, he talked about supply and demand, the laws of scarcity. I would ask you to consider this about the panacea of the live world. Every musician I know has to stay on the road twice as long as they had to. What happens when you go to a festival, when you go to a club, and you and all of your peers, that middle class of musicians, are on the road at the same time? How long will that demand remain? How long does a decent paycheque, a decent payday, come from clubs and promoters when they can turn around and take a band that's maybe had a couple of hits...which used to be able to get you the opening slot on a big tour, or perhaps your own tour of theatres? Now you're lucky if you don't have to do a buy-on to somebody else's big tour and lose money touring.
We have bands on the road right now. We have a band that's about to do the Warped tour. They're not going to make any money. Do you know who's going to make up that shortfall for them, who's going to make sure they can get from show to show, and have a pizza at the end of the night and a place to sleep? Their record label. It's called tour support, and it's one of the marketing tools that the industry still brings to a band's career. We understand that if you want a long career, you'd better get out there and touch people, you'd better have some hit records that radio can play, and you'd better build a solid, solid tour business.
To the idea that the recorded music world lives in some kind of vacuum and is not part of an ecosystem that helps build such festivals as Bluesfest or the Toronto Jazz Festival or Osheaga, they're all part of that ecosystem; none of us live in a vacuum. If one of us goes down, it has a huge effect on the rest of this community. Without record labels investing in new artists, who will these festival owners put on their main stage?