Good morning, Chair and members of the committee. My name is Jennifer Brown, and I am the CEO of SOCAN.
SOCAN represents songwriters, composers and music publishers. We collect licence fees for the public performance of virtually all musical works in Canada and for the reproduction of music. In turn, we distribute royalties to more than 200,000 members and to the millions of rights holders we represent through agreements with international societies. In 2025, SOCAN collected $587 million in licence fees.
Culture is an economic driver, contributing $65 billion to the Canadian economy in 2024. Canada is the third-largest exporter of music in the world, after the United Kingdom and the United States.
There is an opportunity for Canadian music to continue to thrive alongside AI. However, most AI companies are not paying for music. Instead, songwriters, composers and music publishers are currently powering advances in AI models without sharing in the economic benefits. Even worse, the resulting AI models can output vast numbers of complete songs in response to single prompts, and this AI-generated music can potentially replace the work of Canadian creators in the marketplace.
Major digital music services like Apple and Deezer report that more than one-third of the music uploaded to their services these days is fully AI-generated. That means they're being flooded with millions of AI-generated tracks every month. That poses an existential threat for our members.
A global study conducted in late 2024 estimates that under current conditions, up to 24% of music creators' revenues are at risk of disappearing because of AI by 2028. The possibility of any Canadian industry losing up to one-quarter of its revenues in the next two years should cause national alarm. However, that dire prediction is based on current market conditions.
We have the opportunity to change those conditions right now. The use of high-quality human-created music has been called essential to developing AI models, and we can recognize that value through fair compensation to creators and the companies that invest in them. We must focus on an approach that not only values human authorship but also grows the economic impact of Canada's cultural industries rather than shrinking them. Making clear the rejection of a text and data mining—or TDM—exception and establishing effective transparency obligations on training and outputs are essential conditions for the emergence of a functional licensing market.
Let me explain. First, Canada needs to take a strong stance against a text and data mining exception. AI companies are advocating for broad exceptions that would permit them to exploit copyright-protected works. The narrative that innovation and copyright cannot coexist is simply untrue. What is true is that stealing is not innovation. Earlier this year, SOCAN launched a nationwide letter-writing campaign against a TDM exception, obtaining support from almost 9,000 concerned Canadians and demonstrating consensus that the government must not legitimize the theft of creative works.
Internationally, both the Australian and the U.K. governments have publicly decided against implementing a TDM exception. Canada must take a similar approach and affirm that no new or modified copyright exceptions for text and data mining will be considered.
Second, Canada must establish effective transparency obligations on training and outputs. AI companies have simply helped themselves to music, scraping the Internet to train their systems. They must be required to disclose which copyright-protected works have been ingested and stored in their training datasets. It's also vital for AI companies to ensure that the outputs of their systems are labelled as “AI-generated”, clearly distinguishing them from the works of human creators. The labelling of AI outputs will allow the public to make informed choices about the type of music they consume.
SOCAN has been licensing new technologies for over 100 years. This is what we do. Every year, SOCAN licenses billions of individual uses of music by tens of thousands of businesses in Canada, and we collect more than half a billion dollars in royalties and distribute that money globally to millions of songwriters, composers and music publishers.
The challenges presented by AI are not unique. SOCAN is committed to making sure that music creators share in the value created both from the training of the AI systems and from the musical output they generate.
Thank you.