Cover of the new report from Music Canada
April 20, 2024
This week’s federal budget consigned major media and cultural programs to the treadmill: either formalizing previous spending commitments or announcing incremental adjustments to keep up with inflation.
- A $42 million increase to the $1.3 billion CBC grant (effectively cancelling the remaining 450 of 800 staff reductions).
- An additional $3.3 million annually for the Canada Book Fund that supports publishing of Canadian fiction and non-fiction, falling dramatically short of the 50% budget increase promised by the Liberals in their 2021 election platform.
- $20 million to double the funding for the Local Journalism Initiative that pays for 400 news interns across Canada.
- As promised in 2021, $13 million in permanent annual funding for the Indigenous Screen Office that channels production financing to TV and film projects.
- As promised, maintaining the $50 million in annual funding of Telefilm (for the next two years).
- Maintaining funding levels for the Canada Music Fund at $50 million annually, as promised in 2021. (Correction: Heritage officials clarify that the existing budget line of $25.3 million annually has been increased by $16 million for the next two years. Therefore the cumulative $41.3 million falls short of the Liberal campaign promise in 2021).
- Doubling the spending envelope for the federal journalism salary subsidy from 25% to 35% of newsroom payroll (the program does not apply to radio or television companies).
There was a new budget line of $15 million over two years for public service channels Accessible-TV, CPAC, Aboriginal Peoples Television News, the French language news consortium TV5, and Radio Canada ICI-tv. CPAC gets the lion’s share to pay for capital expenditures.
The public service funding is a follow-through on a promise made during the Parliamentary debate over Bill C-11 by former Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez.
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I’m told that the CRTC is about to roll out the timetable for the remaining regulatory issues flowing from the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11.
If the Commission is moving on to this next phase you would also expect the release of the Commission’s ruling on streamer contributions to video and music media funds, reviewed by the Commission back in November and December. The regulatory exemption of YouTuber videos will be confirmed as well.
Here are the major outstanding issues still to be contested by Canadian broadcasters and foreign video and music streamers:
- On the video side, the streamers’ spending obligations to make, license and release Canadian programs;
- Related to that, revisiting the definition of a “Canadian” program;
- Also related to that, the streamers’ obligations to make their Canadian programs “prominent” or “discoverable” to viewers.
- On the music side, the main debate will be over discoverability of Canadian songs, a thorny issue as the music streamers are opposed to making any special efforts;
- Related to Canadian music, the “MAPL” definition of a Canadian song may find its way onto the agenda.
At some point the Commission will have to deal with the Canadian broadcasters queued requests for regulatory relief on Canadian program spending, as well as a laundry list of radio issues put on hold by the Commission back in December 2022.
Also, the Commission continues to leave Global News and the small independent TV stations hanging, an outcome its March 2022 approval of the Rogers-Shaw merger. That ruling left 12 Global News stations cut loose from Shaw vying against the 18 existing independent stations in non-metropolitan markets for limited subsidies from the Commission’s Independent Local News Fund. Two years later, perhaps the Commission will get around to this.
If you want to make sense of it all, allow me to plug my forthcoming book, Canada v. California: How Ottawa took on Netflix and the Streaming Giants. It will be published on May 1 and is available now for pre-order.
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A sign that media industry players are anticipating the next phase of regulatory hearings was the release of a public statement by Spotify and a discoverability study by Music Canada (the voice of the international music “majors” Universal, Sony and Warner).
Spotify wants two things. It wants the Commission to acknowledge the streaking success of Canadian musicians on its global platform, implying that no special measures are required to mimic radio regulations that favour airtime for Canadian songs. And it wants to water down the MAPL definition of Canadian song — by diminishing the contributions of Canadian songwriters in favour of Canadian singers and bands—- so that the international hits from Tate McRae, Drake, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Ikky et al eat up any Canadian prominence obligations that might get set for streaming services.
Music Canada released the report it commissioned from Will Page, Spotify’s former Chief Economist. Not surprisingly, Page’s views align with Spotify, particularly on the streaming platforms having opened the door for Canadian musicians to reach a global audience, surpassing any success they could achieve in the Canadian market, even with regulatory assistance. The argument is that radio regulation did its job in establishing a strong domestic music industry and now it’s time to move on.
That leads Page to make the contentious claim that Canadian musicians get paid better under the global streaming model than they do from a radio-driven Canadian market. While musician earnings are not a regulatory issue for the CRTC to rule upon, they are highly relevant to regulatory efforts such as a Commission-imposed streamer contribution to Canadian music development funds. As well, the distribution of those streamer earnings as between new artists, mid-success bands, and global superstars is relevant to a ruling on prominence regulations.
As far as imitating radio regulations designed to make Canadian songs prominent to domestic audiences, the Page report reiterates the streamers’ plea to leave their song curation alone (even for francophone music, perhaps the most important issue in music regulation and glossed over in his Report).
The report offers a helpful chart of sub-platforms for each major streamer based on song “pushing” by curating streamers and song “pulling” by listeners.
The streamer-controlled “push” curation (human-curated, hybrid human/algorithmic, and radio-imitating “station-play”) are more likely candidates for regulatory expectations of promoting Canadian songs than are the algorithm-assisted creation of playlists and song picking by listeners.
As this chart illustrates, the major streaming platforms don’t always put equal emphasis upon the available song picking options:
Song-picking is certain to be an attention-grabber once the Commission gets down to its regulatory business later this year. I have “freedom of expression” on every square of my CRTC Bingo card.
And the MAPL song definition will remind Boomers and GenXrs of the 1991 dust-up over “who is a Canadian musician?” That controversy broke out when Vancouver-rocker Bryan Adams and his manager staged a public temper tantrum over his hit song “(Everything I do) I do it for you” being left out of the CanCon airtime quota because it was co-written with non-Canadians. The multiple-time Juno and Grammy winner is 48th on the all-time Billboard Hot100.
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Here are two things to read this weekend.
The first is a slam-the-door piece from National Public Radio journalist Uri Berliner arguing that the US public broadcaster has become narrowly partisan and ideological. After publishing it, he got fired. I know your mind has already skipped to the CBC: just knock it off.
The other piece is more light-hearted. I’m in a Ken Whyte Substack groove these days and his latest post is about why guys read less than gals and maybe we (the guys, that is) are too interested in stuff we can use (instead of expanding our horizons). Venus and Mars, it seems.
Then Whyte offers some fun details on what famous guys are reading these days.
So that’s the MediaPolicy recommended read for this weekend: from a guy (me), telling you what another guy says some guys are reading.
Stuff you can use.
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