Thank you for that question.
Our sector would become virtually non-existent in the public's view. It would become a kind of museum exhibit. Without public funding, it could lose the ability to generate revenue.
The main challenge is really to reach the audience. To do that, you must not deregulate the traditional sector but have it contribute to online undertakings. In the online sector, the challenge is to stand out. There are several tens of millions of songs on online music services.
Currently, it's the platforms that choose winners and losers by recommending music to Canadians every day. They do so in many ways. There are editorial playlists, algorithmic playlists and "algotorial" playlists, a portmanteau word formed from the words "algorithmic" and "editorial".
Recommendation tools have a major impact on what people listen to. According to YouTube, the leading online music service in Canada, 70% to 90% of listening time is determined by these recommendation tools. That's enormous. The problem is that the recommendation tools are neutral and deeply biased.
I will now quote the authors of the article “Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?”, published in Competition Policy International: “Music that doesn’t fit easily within an established genre, or which is not in the English language, is also likely to be competitively disadvantaged.”
I'll quote the University of Toronto's Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, in the article “Artificial Intelligence, Music Recommendation, and the Curation of Culture”.
...the effect of the extreme centralization of the global platforms is that it may become harder for local musicians to have their music heard even in their own communities. Recommendation systems therefore have the potential to act as a neocolonialist force in music, trained on data in which dominant user demographics are over-represented, and using the tastes and preferences embedded in this data to guide the music consumption of other musical cultures.
What we're witnessing is cultural standardization, the unregulated wild west. The platforms choose winners based solely on their interests without any consideration for the local culture, be it anglophone, francophone or whatever.
To answer your question more directly, if no regulatory action is taken, people will virtually stop listening to us. Our sector will be unable to generate revenue because cultural standardization has an impact on the entire chain.
The numbers I cited are disastrous, and the CRTC urgently needs to be given the means it requires to do its job.