I was one of those artists long before you were born. How long, I'm not going to say.
Honestly, they're fundamental to an artist's ability to, as I said in my remarks, develop an audience and build markets over time. Everyone loves to talk about a TikTok phenom's overnight success, but even those artists likely started somewhere else. The reality, especially in this country, is that touring, as Jon mentioned, is not only where artists earn most of their revenue; it's really how they build a fan base. If we don't have access to those performance spaces, we simply don't see that.
This was the crux during COVID, obviously. All of you would have felt this in your ridings, with emerging and especially independent artists who had no place to play. We almost lost an entire generation of emerging artists because of this, which is why the Canadian Live Music Association and so many other organizations work together to champion investment in the sector to save infrastructure so that we can continue to facilitate touring across the country at every level.
As I referenced in my remarks, it establishes the pipeline, and not every artist goes on to be a commercial success. I am also an example of that. I do something else now that I very much enjoy. The reality is that in the opportunity to share songs and stories with different communities from coast to coast to coast, that's where it happens. Whether it's a church basement or a library—and we might put some of those venues in the same sort of bucket for the purposes of this conversation—any contraction of those opportunities very likely means fewer performance opportunities for emerging artists, who may ultimately go on to write the song that your children dance to at their wedding. That's how it works.
We have a wonderful artist in the room who is a perfect example of that legitimately. David Myles's music has changed the way Canadians feel many times over, and in a good way. Truly, this is what artists do. If we don't have those spaces, we are simply not creating our artists of the future, and we're missing a huge opportunity as a country if that happens.