About two or three years ago, members of the Association des professionnels de la chanson et de la musique franco-ontariennes attended our annual general meeting, which was taking place in Ottawa, to talk to our members about what could be done to create closer ties between community artists and community radio stations.
At the time, artists expressed a desire to be heard more often, and benefit from better promotion. The people representing our radio stations answered that it is not always easy to have access to music created by community artists. Some of the reasons for that are the fact that distribution is a challenge, that staff turnover in radio stations can be frequent, and that the inherent costs of promoting artists are high. For example, it's expensive to send compact disks through the mail. We came to the conclusion that the best solution would be to create a national platform where music files from our community artists would be downloaded. That way, it would be possible for people to quickly, even instantaneously, access these files for free in cases where a station was connected to the server when the song was added.
The idea was to ensure that the music created by an artist from Western Canada—for example, Manitoba or Saskatchewan—would be broadcast in the Atlantic provinces, and vice versa. That way, songs by Acadian artists would be broadcast over the airwaves of radio stations in Western Canada or Ontario. That project was completed this summer, without additional financial support; in other words, the ARC of Canada paid for the hosting, implementation and maintenance of that platform. Artists now have a platform for disseminating their musical works. And radio stations are now able to more quickly and more easily access the work of our artists.
Even better, our colleagues from the Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec have thus far said that they are very open to this service and inclined to pick it up. It is not yet a reality, because we want to test the platform. There are still some adjustments to be made, but we hope that, very soon from now, the 30 off community radio stations that are members of the ARC du Québec will also have access to this material. Not only will artists from our communities be able to travel to provinces outside Quebec, they will see their music played by radio stations in Quebec.