Good evening.
My name's David Bussières. I'm an author-composer-performer with the duo Alfa Rococo, and I'm also the founder and spokesperson for RAM, the Regroupement des artisans de la musique.
Like Mr. Pierre Lapointe before me, I'd also like to provide my numbers. I do thorough research with my royalty statements for a song to find out that, after generating 30,000 streams on Spotify, we received $8.50, while we hold all copyrights. In answer to the question: how much is a stream worth? I reached this figure: 0.03¢ per stream. On YouTube, after generating 60,000 views, we received $151.37, or 0.5¢ per view.
We can see, as Mr. Lapointe stated before me, that when physical and digital record sales completely vanish, and that day is at our doorstep, copyright royalties will far from make up for the lost income. Streaming is a perfect system for users. Who doesn't dream of having the world's music library at their fingertips? For artists and the industry, it's something else. If you're an international star promoted by a major label and a billion streams are generated per song, it still works, but if you create music in Canada, and particularly francophone music in Quebec, where even the biggest hits struggle to reach a million streams because of the limited size of our market, it's a catastrophe.
I believe that the reform of the Copyright Act is a matter of life and death for artists here. It's urgent and it must also include a reform of the Telecommunications Act and an update to the private copying system so Internet service providers and device manufacturers are also required to contribute to compensation for creators here. People have never spent so much to have access to music. Unfortunately, their money is going to corporations that make enormous profits on the backs of the creators.