Thank you very much.
I am now old enough to say that I've lived through the digital revolution. When I was at university, we had the old Mac Classic microcomputers. They had a monochrome screen. It was not pre-Internet, but pretty darn close.
We've gone through the wonder of the web. Now we're in an era called the “tyranny of the technology”, and it's putting a lot of our artists at risk.
Let me be clear: I want all of your businesses to succeed. Before I got into Parliament, I was in business. I love business. I love those you employ and all the economic benefits, but I also love the arts. I love musicians. I love performance and visual artists. We have to create an ecosystem where we can survive.
My concern is that artists and their work are becoming a utility and that the technological aggregators are literally becoming, or positioning to be, the robber barons of the 21st century. We'll see what happens when cannabis is legal later this week, but as we're talking about technology right now, you are positioning yourselves to take advantage of really good creators, and I'm not sure they're getting paid.
Mr. Schmidt, I'll start with you. I am a Spotify customer, although you may shut off my feed after today's questions. Let's hope not. Look, you made a general statement that there's more money for artists. I believe that. I'm not sure, but I think there's more money in the music industry. I think we've plugged some holes on piracy.
Here's my question. I did some math with YouTube and another aggregator of music, and to make $2,400 a month, which is the minimum wage here—an Alberta wage is $15 an hour—it would take 16.5 million hits on one streaming site and it would take 9.8 million hits on another streaming site for one artist to make $2,400 in one month. That's 180 million hits just to make a living wage for the year.
My question to you is this: How do artists get paid per hit on Spotify today in Canada?