Thank you, Sylvie.
The Radio Starmaker Fund is the English side of the Fonds RadioStar. We started handing out money in 2001.
To some extent we have the easy job, because we are focused on the commercial sector of the business. I was tasked with building the fund in 2001. The broadcasters came to me because I was an entertainment lawyer who represented artists exclusively. I had the easy task of looking at the landscape and saying, “What's the need? What do they need?”
I knew intimately the challenges faced by artists, as Graham has alluded to. There is the myth of the successful artist living the good life. You have a gold record. You win a Juno. You go down to the Bahamas and drink rum punch, and everything's great. That of course is not the reality. It's an ongoing struggle. Alan can explain that to you directly.
We focused early on, as Graham pointed out, to particular points that they're looking at now, which is the touring being so important and international being so important. We started that in 2003. That's because I had worked with bands for years, knowing exactly how expensive it is to get out there in the world. To give the CRTC credit, at the beginning the funding had been targeted for Canada, and they allowed us to move it internationally.
We have five programs right now.
We have domestic marketing and domestic touring. That's roughly half of our money. We give out $7.5 million a year. As Duncan explained, we are on the same curve that FACTOR is on, because we share a stream of that same money. We similarly have planned our money in three-year and seven-year cycles. We have a seven-year capital model. We're always pushing our money and keeping it level for seven years so that the industry can rely on a steady source and amount of funding.
We have domestic marketing, domestic touring, international touring, international marketing, and then we do some domestic industry-building things. For instance, we run an event at the Toronto International Film Festival called Festival Music House, where we showcase Canadian artists.
The touring component in particular is almost $5 million of the $7.5 million.
Our board is made up of 10 industry experts. We have the highest level of expertise on our board. We have someone like Alan; we have the president of Universal, Randy Lennox; the president of Warner Music at one point, Steve Kane; and we have high-level program directors and the broadcasters. We also have very key independent label people on our board, such as Ric Arboit, the head of Nettwerk records. We have very good people to make some of these decisions.
Touring is important for artists, because that money goes directly to artists and it develops a business that is the artist's equity. The labels do not have any involvement in the economic side of touring. That is an artist's business. We're writing cheques directly to the artists for them to go and build a business. They might sell three records and do okay, but then they tour for 15 years.
Take the band Sloan, who I work with. They had all their big records out in the late 1990s. They're still going and touring now, playing the songs that.... As k.d. lang famously told them, you make three records and then spend the rest of your life singing the songs on those three records. That is the reality for a lot of bands, and that's how they live—