Spin City: Round Table on Canadian Music

Chris Cannon | Image: Jack Robinson / Hulton Archive | Published: December 01, 2008

British Columbia – and Vancouver in particular – has long maintained a rich presence in the North American popular music scene. Venues past and present, ranging from the Commodore Ballroom to the Railway Club, have nurtured a bevy of world-class acts: Heart, Joni Mitchell, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Skinny Puppy, Sarah McLachlan, Bryan Adams and Michael Bublé, to name a few. More than 500 local and corporate radio stations compete for the province’s four-million-plus listeners, not counting the worldwide audience available through Internet feeds. And as one of the most arts-oriented provinces in Canada, B.C. is host to an ongoing parade of musical treats, including folk and jazz festivals, top touring acts and a strong community of indie bands.

The market, however, is rife with contradiction. According to Statistics Canada, British Columbians maintain the lowest attention span for radio in the country, listening to just over 16 hours per week, and yet advertising revenues are continuing a small but steady rise. A worldwide decline in album sales, as well as competition from other forms of entertainment, has devastated the music industry, yet the most recent available figures show growing profit margins in Canadian recording and publishing, largely thanks to the low overhead of online delivery channels. But even these delivery channels are a paradox, increasing the distribution opportunities for small artists while redefining listeners’ notions of “ownership” through peer-to-peer networks – a technology that has resulted in a flood of lawsuits and encouraged an adversarial relationship between the music industry and its customers.

To help us navigate this artistic morass, we’ve brought in three of Canada’s top music managers, each based in Vancouver, to discuss the state of radio, the evolution of artists and the impact of Internet technology, among other issues facing their industry:

Sam Feldman has been in the artist game since launching a small Vancouver booking agency in 1971, which has since grown

into SL Feldman & Associates Ltd. (SLFA), a full-service entertainment agency booking more than 200 artists for music, film, television and live concerts. Feldman’s current roster includes such luminaries as Norah Jones, Diana Krall and Joni Mitchell.
Bruce Allen has been booking acts in B.C. since 1966 and has long maintained a reputation for building artists from the ground up, launching the careers of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Loverboy, Bryan Adams and Michael Bublé. Allen and Feldman have worked together building the careers of many of their artists, and both SLFA and Bruce Allen Talent share the parent company A&F Music Ltd. (Canada’s largest full-service talent agency and artist management company).

Terry McBride is known as something of a maverick in the artist management arena, championing consumer rights and maintaining a position on the forefront of emerging technology since founding Nettwerk Music Group in 1984. The Richmond native maintains a roster of more than 50 acts, including the Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Dido and Sarah McLachlan.
Feldman, Allen and McBride represent a major portion of this country’s most successful acts, bringing to bear more than 100 years of experience between them in the music management business.

Chris Cannon (who also publishes under the name Chris Smith) has written about music for dozens of outlets, including Rolling Stone, Billboard and MTV, and he currently writes a weekly music column for the Vancouver Sun. He is the author of 100 Albums That Changed Popular Music (Greenwood Press, 2007), as well as two books on rock culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to teaching cultural criticism at UBC, Cannon appears every Friday on CFMI Rock 101’s Bro Jake Show as “Rusty Shackleford, the Rant King of Vancouver.”