Let's Fix CanCon

Can we get rid of those, please?

Can we get rid of those, please?

Painfully OTM. A friend of mine worked in commercial radio and was always amused by the sheer volume of unsolicited CanCon CDs. 99.9% percent of them were shitty, badly produced self-indulgences that either:

a) ignored established radio formats in favor of free-form noodling,

b) slavishly imitated an established top 40 act, only without the hooks or personality that made that act successful,
or,
c) documented Marissa-style descents into mental illness.

I did a story back in 99 when they upped CanCon from 30 to 35%, and a commercial radio flat out said, "we're just going to play Celine Dion and Shania Twain more often."

Being involved with an entirely volunteer run community radio station, I can't say I welcome the extra paperwork the new proposal would bring, and hell, in terms of community and campus radio, upping the CanCon points for lesser-knowns might actually be detrimental to Canadian artists, no?

*weeps tears of joy*

This story and Tumblr has been doing the rounds.

The jist:

It isn’t the purpose of this article to suggest that FACTOR should stop handing out grants to musicians. Instead, we call on FACTOR to stop handing out grants to business people who exist to prey off Canadian musicians. There is a very big difference between funding a musician and propping up lecherous business practices.

FACTOR’s internal guidelines and lack of National outreach has lead to a corrupted system that has lead to a have/have not Canadian music system. If the mandate is helping disseminate Canadian music, FACTOR is really only helping a small, very specific kind of music (largely middle of the road “indie rock”), and more specifically, business class individuals who have set themselves up to live off the profits of middle of the road indie rock.

Any thoughts? The cash that Emily Haines etc gouge from taxpayers seems quite outrageous. Mind you, I'm a bit of a hater of this kind of MOR indie thing so when I see that Arts&Crafts (whose aesthetic I loathe) took $1.6 million while Jeffrey Remedios from Arts & Crafts is on the board of directors, I get angry. Are Haines, Metric, Stars, Weakerthans, Justin Hines et al. no more than businesses designed to exploit the Canadian Arts funding system?

and from an earlier article on the same Tumblr:

The most recent FACTOR approvals for making a music video in the $20,000 range:

Metric
Doug Crawford
Stars
Lesley Pike
Yukon Blonde

If you want to know the difference between “HAVE” and “HAVE NOT” bands in Canada, look no further. “HAVE” bands take initial success (Metric, Stars, Yukon Blonde) and work it into a career heavily subsidized by FACTOR and provincial arts funding. I have no problem with arts funding, but there was a limit to how much I could take out in student loans, so why should grant be different?

Take Feist winning Polaris last year. So what if the milquetoast Canadian music press were so dazzled by “METALS” that they awarded it with the Polaris, but that prize came with a fucking TOURING VAN. There is no way Feist needs a touring van. WHERE IS FEIST’S TOURING VAN NOW?

Some good points there. His solutions seem reasonable enough. Is there a way that representatives of other styles (plenty of good Canadian heavy rock/metal and electronica) could have more presence within FACTOR itself as well?

I mean, I don't work with FACTOR myself but from the way he presents his case, it seems to make sense.

This doesn't really have anything to do with CanCon regulations per se, though, right?

Also, thinking about it, I don't think artists should be required to match FACTOR grants with their own money. That would be even more of a barrier for lesser-known artists and labels than the status quo.

Regulator cracks whip over porn channels' lack of Canadian content

Does anyone remember Kon Kan?

Smile for a while and let's be jolly
Lo-lo-lo-love shouldn't be so melancholy
Come-come-come-come along and share the good times while-while-while we caaaaaan

xpost Sounds like a lot of political erectness.

FACTOR grants?

Seems to me there is an industry that exists to distribute these grants - largely masquerading as the old-school indie record business. Case in point - Mint Records. Over the last 18 months or so, they have released albums by four acts - Tough Age, Monomyth, Jay Arner and Pick A Piper. All four received FACTOR grants, totalling about $150,000. The label itself received over $20,000 for business expenses. That's Mint's entire activities for the last two years so it seems like rather than being what I would think of as being a "record label", 100% of their business is consultation associated with distributing FACTOR grants. Selling product hardly seems like their business model any more. Or finding and nurturing new artists.

It's more like - find an act who qualifies, help them get a grant, help them spend the grant, move on to next grant recipient. I guess this could explain why Mint Records has had such a lame roster for years. But this is across the country - if you open Exclaim! and see some Canadian act that you've not thought of for a while has just brought out a new album - it's usually because they just got some federal cash to do it. I guess whether or not they sell more than a few hundred copies varies from artist to artist.

I can't work out if this is a good or bad thing. Some of the grants make sense, others seem to prop up a part of the music industry that should just die off. Is it too reactionary of me to say that Jay Arner isn't worth $50K of tax dollars? Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about - after all his album is one of the in-flight selections on Air Canada so maybe people are into him and he's florishing and bringing in business dollars or whatever.

I personally know a couple of FACTOR recipients, who separately got $10-$20 to do little tours or cut an album. They are still playing coffee shops on Salt Spring Island or song-circle type affairs in the boonies. It's keeping them going but it seems like their whole career is now structured around qualifying and applying for these grants and similar ones.

FACTOR grants? Any takers?

Some story about Raekwon giving FACTOR a shakedown. Not sure why it's such a story really. $11,000? There's locals who you'll probably never hear of who have creamed closer to six figures.

The latest Canadaland podcast also covers FACTOR - more or less the story from a year or two ago about how FACTOR favours bands like Metric ($500,000!) who have contacts on the board.