Thursday, August 19, 2010

Songwriters should be leading the charge......

This is a bonus post in follow up to my Road Trip post/video's at the VIMBC.

Kelly and I were chatting with Bill Henderson and it occured to me that  part of our conversation contained an important message for songwriters so I don't want this footage to just sit on the cutting room floor. It relates back to one of the many seminars I went to at the VIMBC  which was about monetizing digital downloads, Bill Henderson and Ralph Murphy were the panelists. Basically, file sharing is here to stay, and so it should be, it is a fantastic tool. At the same time, artists who should be compensated for their work, are not being compensated. 

This is serious for all songwriters and music professionals, the current stats are staggering.

An estimated 1.6 billion music files are shared online in Canada  each year.
* The total number of purchased downloads in Canada was 38 million in 2005.2
* The proportion between these two is 98/2 – 98% sharing, 2% purchasing.

There are people who will argue  that you can't monetize file sharing because grandmother Betsy would never download a file in her life  and she just plays Bingo on Facebook so she shouldn't be charged and so on and so on.........of course...... this is why there is disucssion going on. I'm not sure that everyone knows this, but there is an unobtrusive way to monetize file sharing and music downloading which is fair to both the artist as well as the consumer, or non-consumer if such is the case.  There is a proposal being discussed right now online at SAC and as a songwriter you should be a part of this discussion. The more songwriters who join in and lead the charge towards the inevitable, the more likely the change will be positive and productive and beneficial to all.

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Canada has given the world some of the greatest music ever produced. We believe that implementing a fair way of compensating Canada’s music creators for the online sharing of their music will usher in a new Golden Age of creativity. (from the SAC website)


For more info, and to lend your voice to the conversation, please go HERE~


And speaking of songwriting, here are a few clips from my showcase at the VIMBC.....




Keep writing and rocking friends.
Rach xo

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

ok I am so disappointed that I didn't pay attention and come see you play at the Grotto. Mind you, you would have been to busy with the others in the conference to be able to say hi. I see from your videos you got to see a few places of the Comox Valley. Hope you had a great time here.

Anonymous said...

What? No gee Kelly it would have been nice to say hi, maybe next time.....I think I'm wounded

ha ha

rachael chatoor said...

Aw sorry Kelly, I'm overwhelmed with mssgs lately, I just missed it, my blog hasn't recieved the attention it deserves this summer. I would have for sure liked to say hi! Next time I head out there I will remember to let you know.

Peter Hartman said...

Appreciate you bloggiing this