February 1, 2025
The illegal Trump tariffs begin today, heralding trade war.
Last week MediaPolicy posted an editorial of sorts, calling for elected politicians to greet America First with Canada First in trade negotiations over culture.
A flimsy “cultural exemption” in our free trade deal with the US dates back to 1987. As intended, it offers no more than a speed bump to powerful US media and tech companies determined to dominate Canadian cultural consumption. It needs to be locked down.
How and when that happens in the permanent state of Trump chaos that we’ll endure for the next 1500 days isn’t clear.
Tariffs now, tariffs later,
tariffs done or undone.
How’s the weather in Newfoundland?
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Spotify is feeling it.
In this week’s corporate blog post, the Netflix-of-music-streaming stands triumphant.
As the colossus of the audio industry, Spotify is more than twice the size of any of its nearest competitors TenCent, YouTubeMusic, Apple and Amazon, with over 220 million paid subscribers.
As the proud vanquisher of Napster and the torrent pirates, Spotify reports that every industry metric is looking up. Altogether, audio steamers have a half-billion paid subscribers signed up around the world. Spotify music VP David Kaefer says a billion is the next goal.
Kaefer also says musician earnings are way up over the last ten years, with the top 10,000 musicians on Spotify —out of 10 million— earn at least $100,000 USD annually. That money is shared with band members and songwriters.
Spotify earnings are 25% of a typical “musician’s” total income, he estimates, adding to income from other streaming services, downloads and live performances.
The “long tail” of music creators uploading to streaming platforms, to quote music economist Will Page, “is very long and very skinny.”
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The CRTC is expected to announce in March a public consultation on a policy framework for audio streaming and radio.
On the streaming side, the cash contribution of 5% of Canadian revenues was established by the CRTC last June, so this new consultation will likely focus on other things; the discoverability and prominence of Canadian songs being the logical focus.
The Commission just now put out a request for proposals for a third party research study of the prominence and discoverability of Canadian audio and video content.
Well, better late than never, no? The results won’t be reported until November and will be unavailable for the policy framework.
In response to a MediaPolicy inquiry, commission staff said the report findings would be available when the commission moves into its third phase of setting tailored regulatory terms and conditions for streamers in 2026.
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The recommended podcast for the week is an episode of Bubble Trouble, music economist Will Page’s platform.
He’s invited media oracle Doug Shapiro onto his show. MediaPolicy often recommends Shapiro’s Substack page, The Mediator.
If you follow either tech or media news in the most cursory way, you’re going to find this interview about the past, present and future of media as riveting as I did.
If podcasts aren’t your thing, I found a LinkedIn post from Midia Research’s Mark Mulligan who has some out of the box thoughts about how music streaming algorithms that chase listening time above all else will drive away some artists, hardcore fans, and discerning listeners, into the emerging ecosystem of Do-It-Yourself distribution.
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Here’s an update on my January 1st post about polling conducted by TMU’s The Dais School of Public Policy.
No thin skins for them, the folks at The Dais acknowledged the point I raised about how its annual survey questions failed to solicit the experiences of Jews and women with online hate.
The Dais also saw some merit in my observations that their poll questions testing Canadians’ susceptibility to misinformation on the basis of political ideology were torqued towards right-wing conspiracies and misinformation.
To its credit, The Dais is going to review these issues in preparation for its 2025 survey.
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