My hair is grey, and I'm old enough to remember that there were no glory years for musicians in copyright. We were always robbed.
One year I co-wrote the video of the year, and I told my wife, “This is our year, honey. We're going to get the big money”, because we were in heavy rotation. My cheque was $25.
At that time, the cable networks that were running TV shows claimed they were not making money off of them and that they were offering a service to musicians. SOCAN fought that, and we changed the legislation. Then of course, cable networks went out of business.
When YouTube started, everyone said, “Well, they just got started in a garage, and they're young upstarts.” Now they're part of the biggest corporate entity in the world, Google. Everybody I know shares music on YouTube. I live on YouTube.
SOCAN is able to go after hairstylists and little restaurants to pay copyright fees. Wouldn't it be better if we just had blanket copyright legislation so that for people who were posting songs or making videos out of songs, there was a blanket fee that could be distributed among artists, as we did with cable television and in other areas? Would that provide a guaranteed revenue stream for the use of music on YouTube?