Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this meeting. I am the Chief Executive Officer of the Conseil québécois de la musique, the CQM. Our organization is made up of professional concert musicians, that is, those who play classical, jazz, contemporary and world music, which distinguishes us from those who play popular music.
My presentation is mainly based on a document commissioned by the CQM, and written by Guillaume Sirois, an independent researcher in Montreal. We asked him to write a literature review, titled Le développement de contenus numériques dans le domaine de la musique de concert. My presentation will consist in me reading you excerpts from this document.
Of all the arts, music has probably been the one most deeply and quickly affected by the arrival of digital technologies. Right from the early 2000s, the music industry began a cycle of changes that continued through a succession of new technological innovations. Peer-to-peer file sharing, online music piracy, the arrival of legal download sites, and, finally, music streaming platforms have all, in turn, caused great turmoil in an industry that is continually striving to adapt to the many technological changes in order to maintain its production abilities and its vitality.
The digital shift has come with many promises over the years. We were told, for instance, that it would cut out the middleman from the production and distribution chain, and establish a direct link between creators and their fans. Others believed that we would witness a kind of golden age for revenue from stage performances, and that, in terms of sales, these performances would replace sound recordings as industry drivers. From this perspective, sound recordings would be reduced to a type of loss leader to boost concert ticket sales. For the majority of artists in the music industry, all of these promises made by the digital revolutionaries have fallen flat. A number of these artists still struggle to convert digital opportunities into significant revenue.
All of these problems of introducing digital technologies into the world of music are largely studied from the perspective of popular music. However, a certain number of specific problems arise in the field of concert music.
As the voice for this field, the Conseil québécois de la musique is particularly concerned with all of these problems, because they directly affect all of our members.
Though musicians view enforcing copyright and collecting royalties as key issues in the digital era, they are also deeply affected by the digital revolution in terms of their ability to produce, distribute and promote their music. Therefore, throughout the creative process, creators have seen a change in how they are compensated.
The impacts of these technologies on music consumption habits are changing rapidly, as new options become available to consumers. Sound recording sales are going down, streaming revenue is going up, but musicians are getting hardly any of it, and concert ticket sales revenue is not compensating for lost music sales revenue. The market is highly globalized, with music travelling quickly between America and Europe, and increasingly towards Asia, where the demand for cultural products is soaring.
The new music platforms are almost exclusively developed for popular music, and are sometimes ill-adapted to the realities of classical music. A good example of this is how hard it is to correctly identify the composers, performers and various elements of any given classical music recording. Also, it is hard for these systems to appropriately process pieces with a number of movements—generally recorded on different tracks—specifically when they create playlists, suggested or otherwise. It is hard to correctly catalogue composers and performers, as their names are sometimes spelled differently from one recording to the next. Furthermore, there is insufficient knowledge of classical music's different genres, eras and currents; the platforms process it as one homogenous whole.
I'll add that the remuneration models of these streaming websites, generally speaking, put classical musicians at a disadvantage. These sites generally pay artists a minuscule fixed sum, fractions of a penny, every time a piece is played. The model is based on the number of plays of the same piece, which can generate revenue for musicians in the long run. However, since classical pieces are, on average, much longer than pop songs, the same listening time can generate very different revenue depending on what kind of music is played.
Following this logic, a classical music fan and a popular music fan, both spending an hour listening to their favourite music on one of these sites, would generate different royalties. The first, having listened to a more limited number of pieces, would generate fewer royalty payments, whereas the second, having had the time to consume a larger number of pieces, would generate a higher number of royalty payments.
Furthermore, since classical music audiences are still far smaller than popular music ones, streaming platforms only generate very little revenue with classical music, for now. Ironically, it often takes more musicians to create these pieces.
In this type of market where revenue is generally going down, it becomes harder and harder to finance content production of concert music. Yet, musicians and orchestras are increasingly feeling the need to have their performances heard online, because it is becoming an essential aspect of any form of career progression in this field.
With this in mind, Radio-Canada's decision, taken three years ago, to significantly cut back on the number of concerts it records has only added to the challenges faced by Quebec musicians in producing quality digital content and promoting it to audiences interested in this type of production.
The development of affordable digital technologies that provide increasingly higher quality recordings has somewhat democratized the production of digital concert music content. However, a number of artists also point out that the explosion of digital technologies in the arts has caused certain difficulties for them, specifically in terms of identifying the technologies that meet their needs, and the opportunities these tools provide.
Nevertheless, artists who wish to produce content for the digital world now have a range of possibilities. They can go with the traditional model, where record labels take charge of every step of the production and marketing process, but, more and more of them are now choosing self-production instead, and are even signing risk-sharing contracts with production companies.
This reconfiguration of the production and distribution chain for digital content also raises some important questions about state funding for these types of activities. Until now, all state funding for producing content went directly to the producers, who were the only ones able to provide this service. However, what do we do now that production has become much less centralized, and can be done by many different people? Given that traditional producers are losing ground, that artists now feel more pressure to be their own producers, that a higher number of artists are now doing just that, do we not need to review how state funding is channelled to support this industry?
For concert musicians, producing digital content goes hand in hand with broadcasting and distributing it.
We need to take into account the culture of free access that dominates the digital content market. It is increasingly harder to develop business models that require consumers to pay for cultural content. This is particularly true with emerging art forms. Hugely famous artists and producers can easily count on consumers to pay a certain amount to access their content, given that they know how popular it is. However, emerging artists have no reputation to fall back on, so it's harder for them to profit from their content.
This whole discussion on how the digital world provides vast opportunities for visibility largely rests on the link between digital content distribution and concert attendance. Marketing experts call this “fan-based marketing”. Truth be told, this magic formula has only yielded results for a handful of musicians; it remains out of reach for most of them.
On the topic of discoverability, concert musicians face a sizeable challenge: How do we ensure that audio and video files uploaded by Quebec musicians become discoverable by their audiences, knowing that these files have now entered a competitive space, featuring not only the local scene, but musicians and orchestras from all around the world? In a field like classical music, which is largely based on a common repertoire, how can Quebec musicians distinguish themselves in the digital world, which probably already features a number of versions of the same piece they offer their fans?
This issue is even more concerning for concert musicians, because, like in most of the arts, the role experts play in recommending cultural products is dwindling away.
In closing, it seems that, nowadays, releasing simple audio files with musical performances is increasingly inadequate to meet consumers' high expectations. They increasingly want an added value: something that allows them to see, experience and understand the music. That appetite leads to an explosion of digital products, which can be expensive to produce, and provide little returns: event footage, educational and utility apps, virtual reality, sound installations, and so on.
Here are the main, possible solutions that have emerged from our investigation.
The first is about production funding. We need a reform on how public funding is distributed, in order to better reflect the production costs and the costs associated with current production structures. Then, Internet service providers must be required to contribute to production funds for cultural digital content. We suggest putting a culture tax on devices that play digital content, as well as reforming the music industry's taxation to include tax credits, like those offered in the film industry.
We recommend having a copyright reform on royalty payments, and introducing a uniform system of data collection that would allow people to identify right holders.
Furthermore, we need education on copyrights. We need to inform musicians of their rights and responsibilities, and raise public awareness about the repercussions their online actions have on the arts and culture, and about responsible consumption in this sector.
Lastly, we need promotion initiatives to spread awareness for content available on the large, international platforms.
Thank you.
