Digital Content Initiative (DCI) Report – May 2015

Tim Brady, Chair

OpenBBRecMicrophone

The Dig­i­tal Con­tent Ini­tia­tive (DCI) is a project, fund­ed by a $20,000 Cana­da Coun­cil for the Arts grant, to look for new fund­ing and new struc­tures for the record­ing, dis­sem­i­na­tion, pro­mo­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of Cana­di­an “spe­cial­ized” music, in dig­i­tal content.

Basi­cal­ly – an attempt to find an alter­na­tive way to get our music out there (in Cana­da and inter­na­tion­al­ly), now that two key pil­lars of Cana­di­an music – CBC and Radio-Cana­da – have all but stopped record­ing music. It is a very ambi­tious, and a slight­ly Don Quixot­ian idea, but it is an absolute neces­si­ty for Cana­di­an music in 2015 and beyond.

Over the last 6 months the DCI has done a lot of work: fine-tuned our argu­ments, our sta­tis­tics and our “pitch” doc­u­ment (to pri­vate and pub­lic fun­ders); had very detailed meet­ings with part­ners in both Toron­to and Mon­tréal; and designed the tech­ni­cal “grant pro­gramme” we are propos­ing. Our con­sul­tant Pierre Lalonde has con­tin­ued his infor­mal dis­cus­sions with fun­ders and pri­vate part­ners, prepar­ing the ground­work for the proposal.

The DCI com­mis­sioned a musi­co­log­i­cal research doc­u­ment, in order to give aca­d­e­m­ic and sci­en­tif­ic sup­port to our argu­ments as to the val­ue of “spe­cial­ized” music. This doc­u­ment has been com­plet­ed, joint­ly authored by Mar­tin Guer­pin and Jonathan Gold­man of the Uni­ver­sité de Mon­tréal, and includes an analy­sis and bib­li­og­ra­phy of a wide range of stud­ies that have been pub­lished on the impor­tance and ben­e­fits of music and cre­ativ­i­ty. CNMN mem­bers are wel­come to freely use these doc­u­ment, and these argu­ments, when help­ing to sup­port the cause of cre­ative new music in Cana­da. Check out the report here.

We will start to have infor­mal meet­ings in June to dis­cuss this ini­tia­tive with poten­tial part­ners, as well as pub­lic and pri­vate fun­ders. The fed­er­al elec­tion will slow this process down – regard­less of who wins the Octo­ber elec­tion, all gov­ern­ment depart­ments are now in “wait and see” mode. No new deci­sions will hap­pen until after the elec­tion, in fact, things will only real­ly get back to nor­mal in 2016.

How­ev­er, we can get a sense of how our argu­ments work at these infor­mal meet­ings, so that we are as effec­tive as pos­si­ble once we get to the for­mal pre­sen­ta­tion stage.

The DCI is also get­ting inter­est from oth­er par­ties: we have been invit­ed to present the project at the Clas­si­cal: Next con­fer­ence in Rot­ter­dam May 20–23, 2015 and at the bi-annu­al Banff Opera Col­lo­qui­um with Opera.ca in July 2015. So the project is gain­ing momentum.

Tim Brady – May 5, 2015

Please con­tact Tim Brady for more information
tim@timbrady.ca

Read past bul­letin entries from this committee:

 

Direct link: Dig­i­tal Con­tent Ini­tia­tive (DCI) Report – May 2015
Return to full Bul­letin – May 2015