Good evening. Thank you for having me this evening.
My name's Luc Fortin. I'm a professional musician, a guitar player. In my career, I have released seven albums of so-called niche music, instrumental world jazz music. Those albums are distributed digitally around the world on dozens of platforms. I receive almost nothing in rights from sound recordings distributed digitally, about $2 per quarter, which doesn't allow for investment in future projects.
That is despite the fact that, at one point, one of my albums reached a decent spot on iTunes charts in the world music niche. How can investments be made in original content if, once on Spotify, it can be listened to thousands of times and earn only a few dollars for the rights holders? Composers lose a lot there, and performers who were entitled to fair compensation for radio broadcast receive nothing for distributions on Spotify, iTunes Music and others.
So, we also realize that diversity and originality are drowned in an infinite cloud of works available at almost no cost, but that generate almost no income for the rights holders. As such, long and profitable careers for original and innovative creators will unfortunately become a rare exception. it was possible to live, even modestly, from so-called niche music without necessarily aiming for huge commercial success. There was a kind of middle class of musicians who received decent income when their music was sold and distributed, even on a modest scale.
Today, the typical inequalities of extreme capitalism have been reproduced in music with the 1% of the ultra-rich who leave crumbs for the remaining 99%. I quote, with permission from the author — and I'm using the education exception here — Montréal music columnist Alain Brunet, who published a book entitled La misère des niches: [translation] "Spotify, Netflix and Amazon offer their users vast content, YouTube and Facebook circulate billions of videos—created by hundreds of thousands of amateurs and impoverished professionals."