Sustainable Futures Regional Meetings 2024 Report

CNMN acknowl­edges the finan­cial sup­port of FACTOR, the Gov­ern­ment of Cana­da and of Canada’s pri­vate radio broadcasters.

CNMN would like to thank the Long­shad­ow fes­ti­val for its gen­er­ous hos­pi­tal­i­ty and for their help in mak­ing this con­ver­sa­tion possible.

This con­ver­sa­tion took place on June 9th 2024th at Car­ment Braden’s stu­dio, in Yellowknife.

This con­ver­sa­tion was opened by land acknowl­edge­ment deliv­ered by CNMN cur­rent gen­er­al direc­tor Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture rec­og­niz­ing that this con­ver­sa­tion took place in Chief Drygeese Ter­ri­to­ry in Treaty 8, the tra­di­tion­al land of the Yel­lowknives Dene and home to the North Slave Métis, and the Tłı̨chǫ people.

Foisy-Cou­ture also took a moment to thank and con­grat­u­late the Long­shad­ow team and artists for the amount of artis­tic care and respect that went into mak­ing this fes­ti­val pos­si­ble and for let­ting CNMN con­tribute to it. Foisy-Cou­ture also took a moment to thank his hosts Rob Elo, Naima Jutha and For­est for wel­com­ing him into their home; and to express an enor­mous amount of grat­i­tude to Car­men with­out whom CNMN’s pres­ence would not have been pos­si­ble. All par­tic­i­pants also took a moment to go in a cir­cle to present them­selves to the group.

This con­ver­sa­tion fea­tured short keynote inter­ven­tions about the Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor from guest Rob Elo and fea­tured Robert Uchi­da and the Gar­neau Strings Quar­tet as guest contributors.

It was mod­er­at­ed by Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture in tan­dem with Longshadow’s co-artis­tic direc­tor Car­men Braden. Apart from spe­cif­ic inter­ven­tions from the mod­er­a­tor and keynote speak­ers the con­tri­bu­tions of every oth­er par­tic­i­pant is anonymized (X).

This con­ver­sa­tion was attend­ed by sev­er­al artists and musi­cians who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Long­shad­ow music fes­ti­val as well as mul­ti­ple local musi­cians and art work­ers. We thanked them for their gen­er­ous inputs.

In order to bet­ter expose the real­i­ties and dynam­ics at work in the field of cre­ative music and sound prac­tice in Yel­lowknife, and the North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries, and to cel­e­brate CNMN first con­ver­sa­tion in the region, this report includes an exten­sive tran­scrip­tion of the dis­cus­sion that took place. Edits were made strict­ly in order to facil­i­tate the com­pre­hen­sion and the read­ing experience.

Topics Covered in the Conversation

Con­text and Chal­lenges in Yellowknife

• Geo­graph­ic, eco­nom­ic, and artis­tic unique­ness of Yellowknife
• Lack of artis­tic infra­struc­ture and bar­ri­ers to access­ing funding
• Chal­lenges for North­ern musi­cians: iso­la­tion, trav­el costs, and lack of venues

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty in Music

• Envi­ron­men­tal and struc­tur­al sustainability
• Bal­anc­ing the car­bon foot­print of tour­ing with local enrichment
• Eco­nom­ic and social impact of small, com­mu­ni­ty-focused events

Com­mu­ni­ty and Collaboration

• Impor­tance of rela­tion­ship-build­ing with­in the artis­tic community
• The role of fes­ti­vals and orga­ni­za­tions in fos­ter­ing collaboration
• Cross-cul­tur­al and inter­gen­er­a­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties in music-making

Youth Engage­ment and Education

• The need for music edu­ca­tion in schools
• Impor­tance of acces­si­ble venues for young musicians
• Oppor­tu­ni­ties to fos­ter ear­ly expe­ri­ences with music and performance

Bar­ri­ers to Career Devel­op­ment for North­ern Artists

• Lim­it­ed access to resources like grants and managers.
• Lack of local per­for­mance oppor­tu­ni­ties and tour­ing support.
• Chal­lenges in nav­i­gat­ing grant sys­tems and the music industry

Advo­ca­cy and Policy

• Gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­i­ty in sup­port­ing the arts
• Oppor­tu­ni­ties to lever­age Yellowknife’s unique­ness for cul­tur­al branding
• Calls for bet­ter infra­struc­ture and cor­po­rate sponsorship

Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor (CMI) Experiences

• Reflec­tions on the val­ue of the pro­gram for pro­fes­sion­al development
• Insights on roy­al­ties, rights, and the impor­tance of reg­is­ter­ing music
• Chal­lenges with social media, self-mar­ket­ing, and per­son­al growth in the industry

SOCAN and Music Licensing

• Impor­tance of reg­is­ter­ing with SOCAN and under­stand­ing rights
• Roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties of artists and venues in licens­ing and royalties
• Prac­ti­cal steps for musi­cians to secure their intel­lec­tu­al property

Cul­tur­al Iden­ti­ty and Diver­si­ty in Music

• Inte­grat­ing Dene, Métis, Inu­it, and oth­er cul­tur­al tra­di­tions into the music scene
• Oppor­tu­ni­ties for cul­tur­al exchange and collaboration
• Embrac­ing diver­si­ty to cre­ate a uni­fied, dis­tinc­tive artis­tic community

DIY Approach­es and Exper­i­men­tal Music

• Insights from exper­i­men­tal and DIY music practices
• Build­ing alter­na­tive venues and fos­ter­ing grass­roots communities
• Expand­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty to non-tra­di­tion­al forms of music-making

Eco­nom­ic and Social Impact of Music

• Research into the eco­nom­ic mul­ti­pli­er effects of com­mu­ni­ty-based music.
• Com­par­i­son with inter­na­tion­al mod­els like Reyk­javik and Daw­son City.
• Music as a low-con­sump­tion eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty with poten­tial for growth.

Fes­ti­val Reflec­tions and Artist Experiences

• Col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ences dur­ing the Long­shad­ow Festival.
• Per­son­al growth, inspi­ra­tion, and mutu­al learn­ing among participants.
• Emo­tion­al and cre­ative ful­fill­ment through col­lec­tive music-making.

Open­ing ques­tion from Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: 

So I’ll just ask a first ques­tion to open the dis­cus­sion and then we can dis­cuss about this: “How can music and sound orga­ni­za­tions sup­port artis­tic work and ini­tia­tives that both pro­mote greater aware­ness of cli­mate issues and engage in the author­ing of a health­i­er world?”. I know this is already a fair­ly big ques­tion. I’ll answer first that as an orga­ni­za­tion, this is some­thing we’ve tried to do by hav­ing these meet­ings. To, first of all, think about it, but also, by engag­ing more and more in com­mu­ni­ty ini­tia­tives that also share, I think, a lot of resources and engage with chal­lenges of that per­spec­tive. I think that’s per­son­al­ly what I’ve noticed a lot here. I’ve been amazed by the shar­ing of resources and how every­body kind of real­ly seemed to have a very col­lab­o­ra­tive mind­set. To be able to do things that prob­a­bly would­n’t be pos­si­ble if you were hop­ing to do them alone or in a more tra­di­tion­al or com­mer­cial way. That’s been very inspir­ing for me to see. If any­body wants to maybe share some­thing on the par­tic­u­lar­ly, very rare, sit­u­a­tion of Yel­lowknife, I’d be hap­py to hear [more] about this. 

-You’re ask­ing about how to use music to help pro­mote such things as envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and that sort of thing. Is that the point of your question? 

-Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: It can be. 

- And that’s also part of the ques­tion is, does it have to be explic­it in the music or per­haps it’s more on an orga­ni­za­tion­al lev­el or how we col­lec­tive­ly organize?

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: If you think it needs to be more in the music, that’s some­thing that is very valu­able and inter­est­ing and I’d be hap­py to hear you say more about this. 

- I’ve not thought about it before, but the first thing that came to my mind when you posed the ques­tion there was some­thing like Folk on the Rocks, the music fes­ti­val here every year. Hav­ing some sort of a pres­ence from an orga­ni­za­tion [deal­ing with cli­mate, envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and sus­tain­abil­i­ty issues] at the fes­ti­val, whether on stage or in one of the booths or some­thing like that. And using that kind of an occa­sion to inter­act with peo­ple and pro­mote the pur­pos­es of the orga­ni­za­tion that way. That would be one idea any­way. Just a quick one. And maybe even […] say some­thing at NACC (North­ern Arts and Cul­tur­al Cen­ter).

-  I was going to say that.

- Yeah, so maybe have a poster board or a booth of some sort at the big per­for­mances at NACC, some­thing like that.

- Maybe I feel like what comes to mind right away is some­body who’s not here, like Mun­ya Man­darus. His videos that he makes him­self and the videos that he made of Long­shad­ow, the events that we have here.I guess Long­shad­ow was more indoors, but the music videos he films of his music, it’s African music, com­ing in our land­scape, in the Yel­lowknife land­scape. And hav­ing an orga­ni­za­tion like yours that could share that sort of thing.  And Folk on the Rocks […] brings up artists that engage with our land­scape and our com­mu­ni­ty. And just […]mak­ing nation­al aware­ness to the beau­ty that we’re sur­round­ed with here and to the com­mu­ni­ty that we have here, both artis­tic and oth­er­wise. I think that’s real­ly nice. It’s cre­at­ing more art, essen­tial­ly, that has to do with the com­mu­ni­ty. […] Songs that Ryan McCord writes, […] you know, folk music. This is great folk music, but that’s talk­ing about Yel­lowknife specif­i­cal­ly. Visu­als that are dis­play­ing what Yel­lowknife is all about and hav­ing some­one like the Cana­di­an New Music Net­work to share that with the rest of Cana­da. Hope­ful­ly that’s inspi­ra­tional in a way that can affect the rest of the coun­try, I guess. Like:  “wow, there’s a com­mu­ni­ty that real­ly works and real­ly inter­acts with its nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment!”.

- I think also some­thing that would help musi­cians to have a clear sense of how, what’s the way to describe this? […] Ways that can direct peo­ple’s activism to pres­sure the gov­ern­ment with­in the music indus­try specif­i­cal­ly to address things like the con­sol­i­da­tion of the live music indus­try around real­ly huge, very car­bon-inten­sive per­for­mances. So we see this in the US, and here and in oth­er places to a less­er extent, major tick­et providers real­ly stran­gling small­er music venues and skew­ing the music indus­try towards these huge­ly finan­cial­ly and car­bon-inten­sive per­for­mances and tour­ing sys­tems that are shut­ting out an awful lot of musi­cians. […] I don’t know real­ly [know] what [is] sort of the over­all eco­nom­ic impact on the music sec­tor. Even just fund­ing some research into that specif­i­cal­ly would be real­ly inter­est­ing, just to see how much peo­ple who are con­sid­er­ing careers in the per­form­ing arts, […] how much are they rely­ing on get­ting into this, that end of the indus­try that relies on these very big per­for­mances? And what can we do as activists, what can the gov­ern­ment do as pol­i­cy­mak­ers to address that a lit­tle bit? […] It’s kind of a lit­tle bit dry maybe, but it’s sort of a prac­ti­cal con­cern for how we might, as musi­cians, push for a less car­bon-inten­sive indus­try overall. 

-  I [orig­i­nal­ly] had some thoughts about min­i­miz­ing car­bon impact on trav­el­ing musi­cians and just flights and things like that. But then my thought kind of spun 180 and I real­ized we brought up four musi­cians and the whole com­mu­ni­ty gets to expe­ri­ence an enrich­ing cul­tur­al moment; so now a hun­dred peo­ple did­n’t have to trav­el some­where else. So because Yel­lowknife is iso­lat­ed, I think the more great enrich­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that we can bring up here for this com­mu­ni­ty, the less peo­ple have that itch to trav­el down for a festival. 

-  It would be won­der­ful to fund some research into the eco­nom­ic mul­ti­pli­ers of exact­ly what you’re describ­ing. What is the impact of these sort of small­er, more inti­mate events that are made pos­si­ble through small inde­pen­dent venues ver­sus, the thing you’re talk­ing about, a hun­dred peo­ple trav­el­ing to go and see a big land­mark show where it’s maybe 200 bucks or 300 bucks a ticket. 

-  Which [peo­ple] will still do because it’s awe­some, but maybe less often if and because we have more going on here. […] It’s prob­a­bly more eco­nom­i­cal to bring the action here.

- Gar­neau String Quar­tet: Because we were here, we were able to go to schools in lit­tle com­mu­ni­ties out­side of Yel­lowknife and play for peo­ple there who would oth­er­wise prob­a­bly not con­sid­er tak­ing a plane to Edmon­ton. […] I would imag­ine that once you get them here (artists) you want to make sure that you bring them places so peo­ple can hear dif­fer­ent things in their own envi­ron­ment… You bring the artist there.

- I think it’s also very valu­able to have these small groups come up and have these inti­mate per­for­mances and inter­ac­tions with peo­ple here because I remem­ber the first time I saw — I grew up in where there was lots of fid­dle play­ers —  a full string quar­tet, it was at the open sky fes­ti­val in Fort Simp­son which is very small — So good! They do some real­ly cool stuff —  and I was a young kid and I saw this for the first time and It Imme­di­ate­ly real­ly cap­tured my inter­est. And kind of going from there, I got here (study­ing com­po­si­tion and play­ing). And so [to] bring those expe­ri­ences to com­mu­ni­ties that wouldn’t real­ly have them is a real­ly good way to inspire that. And then ten years lat­er you have this group of young musi­cians, com­posers, per­form­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty doing stuff which is also a real­ly great way to bring it up.

- That brings some­thing up that I was think­ing too. There are oth­er fes­ti­vals here in the North­west Ter­ri­to­ries in the small­er com­mu­ni­ties, such as the Open Sky. There used to be one in Fort Smith called the Friend­ship Fes­ti­val; there’s the Great North­ern Music Fes­ti­val up in Inu­vik; there was for a while Mid­way Lake Fes­ti­val right in the mid­dle of nowhere near Fort McPher­son… Those fes­ti­vals like that could stand sup­port as well. It is very impor­tant that we keep what we have going on here. Those oth­er small­er fes­ti­vals have val­ues as well. You were tak­ing about the effect and the influ­ence it had on you, it could be (influ­en­tial) for oth­er peo­ple there as well. It’s not just here in Yel­lowknife but also in oth­er places as well, that there are peo­ple inter­est­ed in the issues that we are talk­ing about here.

- The NWT (North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries) econ­o­my is very resource based, or at least that’s cer­tain­ly what’s pro­mot­ed most­ly by the gov­ern­ment, but they are also talk­ing about the diver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my and music as a whole, it is very low ressource use, right? So just envi­ron­men­tal­ly, those huge fes­ti­vals aside, for the most part it’s a non-con­sump­tive way of liv­ing and we should pro­mote that more and cel­e­brate that in our econ­o­my a lot more. I mean this (many) num­ber of peo­ple mak­ing at least part of their liv­ing with music is huge and so much less con­sump­tive than the oth­er kind of stuff and eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties that are usu­al­ly pro­mot­ed up here.

-  That’s a real­ly impor­tant point, and you’ve artic­u­lat­ed it real­ly well. Doing what we can to help peo­ple pur­sue careers in per­form­ing arts. I think that maybe we face bar­ri­ers up here that peo­ple don’t have in oth­er places. I grew up in a mid-sized city about an hour away from Lon­don (UK) with a thriv­ing music scene. There was lim­it­less oppor­tu­ni­ties to expe­ri­ence music and (cul­tur­al) things. Peo­ple are sort of told that pur­su­ing a career in per­form­ing arts is sort of fan­ci­ful, where actu­al­ly we see in all parts of the world that the per­form­ing art sec­tor is a huge­ly eco­nom­i­cal­ly impor­tant sec­tor full of mean­ing­ful jobs. The more we can help peo­ple to pur­sue these jobs, the less like­ly they are to end up in more con­sump­tive and con­sum­ma­tive type jobs. That is a real­ly impor­tant point.

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: Thank you so much for these answers.

- I want to say some­thing about this ques­tion, too. I remem­ber in 2017, I was in Mon­tre­al, and I had one of my cousins here.  He want­ed me to come over and to vis­it. But I talked to some of my friends. I said, I’m going to leave Mon­tre­al to go to Yel­lowknife. A lot of peo­ple, almost all, even me, did­n’t know where [it was] exact­ly. And first thing, I’m a French speak­er, but I’m going to try to give my idea in Eng­lish, but it’s not going to be easy for me (laughing).Talking about music, I think music could be real­ly one thing can help a com­mu­ni­ty like Yel­lowknife and then to be of val­ue, to be in the spot­light. But I’m ask­ing myself, if the gov­ern­ment has a plan to use the musi­cians, the music indus­try, to help to real­ly give that val­ue, to put Yel­lowknife on the front of things. Because if the musi­cians start talk­ing about Yel­lowknife, make video clips that val­ue this space, show the land in their videos. These videos could be seen every­where in the world […] .Music could be some­thing that encour­ages tourists to come but also help Yel­lowknife and the North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries make the news. I don’t know, but some­times I feel [that] a lot of peo­ple want to help but they don’t want to go on the floor to grab some­thing on the floor, some­body on the floor to help them stand. They’re just wait­ing until that per­son tries to stand by him­self, and then when he stands [they] go to [them] to say, “okay, now I want to go with it” […] 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: I would have anoth­er ques­tion that I think a lot of peo­ple brought up. What tools and sup­port can orga­ni­za­tions like mine, but also on a nation­al lev­el, oth­er musi­cal orga­ni­za­tions or gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions could do to con­tin­ue to offer sup­port and to ensure rel­e­vance and via­bil­i­ty of the music sec­tor and what would be rea­son­able or what would you con­sid­er radical? 

- In terms of gov­ern­ment sup­port, the North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries feels twen­ty years behind every­body else. For me one of the biggest strug­gles I have right now is that it’s very dif­fi­cult for me to ful­ly sus­tain a career just in Yel­lowknife so I do trav­el a lot. I rec­og­nize that I have that priv­i­lege but it’s like I can’t real­ly [do oth­er­wise]… I’m doing that at this point in my career to get known in more places and in some cas­es tak­ing a hit and not even mak­ing mon­ey by going down to Cal­gary, or Edmon­ton, or wher­ev­er to do those things. And I approached the gov­ern­ment […] about where is the tour­ing sup­port for musi­cians in the NWT. I don’t real­ly like doing that because it feels pret­ty enti­tled, but at the same time, I am already fac­ing these bar­ri­ers: I am fur­ther away in the coun­try than every­body else is; I incur these addi­tion­al costs; and my oth­er North­ern coun­ter­parts have way more fund­ing and sup­port to be able to do that. And so I think an orga­ni­za­tion poten­tial­ly (like CNMN), and oth­ers could be help­ing us into lob­by­ing the gov­ern­ment into say­ing: “Hey in terms of mak­ing this acces­si­ble to some pret­ty tal­ent­ed North­ern musi­cians…”. Like there is so much tal­ent com­ing out of the NWT right now. Not only in music but also in writ­ing. It’s pret­ty crazy. It feels like we have so many more bar­ri­ers to over­come to get to the mar­kets that we need to get to in order to make it on the scene. What­ev­er which scene you are in. I left a full time teach­ing career just before COVID. 

- Ouch ! (Laugh­ter from the audience)

- I just have been like slam­ming against this for, you know, for four years, which I know is noth­ing com­pared to many oth­er folks and it’s just to have addi­tion­al sup­port from oth­er folks who have the resources to do research. (…) And there is some research out there in terms of what you guys are talk­ing about, I can’t remem­ber who it was, […] but they specif­i­cal­ly did the impact of indige­nous music on like in com­mu­ni­ties and the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits of it (See the link at the bot­tom of the page) and I pulled that out and put that in busi­ness plans and dif­fer­ent things but more sol­id research on that kind of stuff for maybe north­ern musi­cians in gen­er­al, I think would help folks musi­cians, to real­ly […| prove our val­ue and worth if we need to jus­ti­fy it in a bot­tom line, which often we do in terms of fund­ing and gov­ern­ment support.

- We always have to (Peo­ple agreeing).

- It’s not like peo­ple are: “oh here go cre­ate your art, we expect noth­ing”. And so lob­by­ing to make that voice stronger, pro­vid­ing research would prob­a­bly be valuable. 

- There was sup­port for the North­ern Per­form­ers grant. Which I thought was a great pro­gram. […] That’s no more. I don’t know why is that no more. There’s not less mon­ey but there’s been a whole trans­for­ma­tion of the art fund­ing that we are all still get­ting to know. Basi­cal­ly it comes down to Small, medi­um and large asks. Large you have to be a soci­ety and it’s a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars, but it’s not just for an indi­vid­ual to do every­thing, small is like five thou­sand dol­lars, which we could prob­a­bly all access, but it’s once a year you can get that. And it does not work for some­body who actu­al­ly needs to go 3–4‑5 times a year to do a tour. Then you are going for Cana­da Art Coun­cil and Fac­tor, which is fine but you are wait­ing half a year with your fin­gers crossed that this will come through or you going to have to go into debt to go on this tour. It’s hard.

-  And they are not super acces­si­ble (the grants). This might sounds weird but I think about myself as a pret­ty edu­cat­ed per­son, hav­ing the sup­port of my entre­pre­neur set­tler dad also who helps me nav­i­gate the colo­nial sys­tem of apply­ing for grants and for all of those things. I see many tal­ent­ed folks who just can’t nav­i­gate that sys­tem. I am here slam­ming my head against the wall and I have a lot of ressources behind me. It’s just sad to see real­ly tal­ent­ed peo­ple not being able to get (the grant). I think maybe we do a bet­ter job of that in Yel­lowknife but I think com­mu­ni­ties get forgotten.

-  I’m going to use a swear word and I am sor­ry and I apol­o­gized in front of every­body but: “What about hav­ing a man­ag­er ?”. Who does that kind of paper­work and slug­ging, and dig­ging and so forth for you?

-  I’ve been try­ing to find a man­ag­er for 4 years now! […] In the north… Before a man­ag­er is going to take you on, they want to be assured that you are going to bring enough mon­ey to give them their 10 to 15% per­cent. You have to prove that on your own first. With help and con­nec­tions I tried to go after big names, and small names too. They give me advices.  The advices: I need to get my social media pro­files up. — Which I hate! That’s not how I want to inter­act with the world. — And to be essen­tial­ly more well know. There has to be a step­ping stone and we don’t have that step­ping stone right now. And that’s what I think orga­ni­za­tions can do, to advo­cate for that step­ping stone.

-  That works yeah.

(Par­tic­i­pants are dis­cussing about their spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ences in apply­ing to small­er project based grant in NWT)

- My expe­ri­ence is good. For exam­ple, If you want to make a new album you apply. It’s between 15,000 to 20,000$ to make an album now. Which I don’t think that’s high end at all, I real­ly don’t. If you get it they [usu­al­ly] give you half of that typ­i­cal­ly. Which is super frus­trat­ing. I get it, I talked to the folks and they do that because they want more mon­ey to go around to more peo­ple which is fair and fine. But then as a musi­cian you have to go around and try and find oth­er folks who are will­ing to invest in that. And that’s the job of a musi­cian I guess. And so I think there is sup­port for small­er projects, which I think we’ve been good at in a bunch of sec­tors actu­al­ly. Like [the] film sec­tor is pret­ty decent with pro­vid­ing pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment to begin­ners and mak­ing that acces­si­ble. But it’s a cer­tain stage that you get to[…] |There’s just so many road­block into get­ting the access and into get­ting down south. So you go away and I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly want to spend as much time away as I do… but I need to. And that’s hard. And I don’t have kids. Besides my love of Yel­lowknife and my home, I don’t have as many things tying me down as many peo­ple do, so I actu­al­ly have less bar­ri­ers than I think a lot of peo­ple do.

- I think the flip side of this coin is how as artists do we make our way into the larg­er south­ern mar­ket but as far as the sus­tain­abil­i­ty ques­tion, there is how do we, again, get more artists up here to inspire cre­ation up here? So we can open for peo­ple, we can do that. I’m just putting this on record, I know I’ve prob­a­bly had this con­ver­sa­tion with many peo­ple in this room. We face a real prob­lem in Yel­lowknife specif­i­cal­ly of not hav­ing a per­for­mance spe­cif­ic venue oth­er than NACC (The North­ern Arts and Cul­tur­al Cen­tre) which is tai­lored to be a very spe­cif­ic type of artis­tic expe­ri­ence. Which is awe­some, let the record show they’re awe­some. But there’s no stand­ing room, let’s dance, let’s have fun for gen­res that are not for this (kind of setup).

-  Espe­cial­ly if you are under 19 (peo­ple agree­ing). I remem­ber wit­ness­ing the most ridicu­lous thing. A band here had a drum­mer join­ing them. The drum­mer was sev­en­teen, and the drum­mer had to be escort­ed to the stage by the secu­ri­ty guard. The secu­ri­ty guard wait­ed by the stage to the end of the set and then escort­ed the poor lit­tle guy out. It is a huge thing for me. Peo­ple who are look­ing at careers into per­form­ing arts, they have noth­ing in those for­ma­tive years between say 14 and 19. Those were the years where I devel­oped into the lev­el of play­ing tour­ing cir­cuits and sup­port­ing big bands and things like that. That’s a huge, huge thing to get that expe­ri­ence. That’s when you are exposed to the indus­try, you see how it works, you see how shows are orga­nized, you meet tour man­agers, mer­chan­dise peo­ple, oth­er musi­cians, all that kind of stuff. There’s noth­ing for young peo­ple like that here, except Folk on the Rocks and it real­ly comes down to, I think, the lack of phys­i­cal spaces. But I might be huge­ly biased in this regard.

-  It’s also a time when it’s more accept­able to fail when you are young. 

- Absolute­ly

-  Now I’m com­ing in at thir­ty some­thing and I’m learn­ing all this stuff and peo­ple are expect­ing more per­fec­tion but it’s like how the hell should I know how to do this because I have not done it like this before.

-  It’s where the acces­si­ble inde­pen­dent venues need to come in. There was a pub in my home­town where we would play. When my band was all four­teen. It was 2 bucks a tick­et, you kept a buck for every tick­et you sold and then they would make their mon­ey from the bars and oth­er things but the  entry was non-exis­tent. We f***ing sucked (every­one is laugh­ing) but we would bring in like 50 high school kids to come and have a great time and in the process of doing that you [learn so much|. We were a met­al band we, sup­port­ed Napalm Death. That was a huge expe­ri­ence! You get to see the pro­fes­sion­al bands, it’s such an impor­tant growth experience.

- I would say that we have this coin with the dif­fer­ent side, the way larg­er art orga­ni­za­tions could poten­tial­ly help sup­port more artists com­ing here and more artists going down south is with more [venue sup­port].  But before we can actu­al­ly set some kind of exchange pro­gram we do need more phys­i­cal space. With the end goals, to cre­ate a more sus­tain­able music com­mu­ni­ty, one of these means would be hav­ing very well pre-estab­lished exchanges. Artists in res­i­dence exchanges where we can send peo­ple from here down south and in exchange we can bring south­ern artists up. I think there would be such val­ue in doing that and hav­ing art larg­er orga­ni­za­tions like CCA (Cana­di­an Coun­cil for the Arts) or CNMN help­ing in cre­at­ing the infra­struc­tures to do these kinds of exchanges.

- Speak­ing direct­ly to that, one of the things I found the most valu­able in this idea of build­ing rela­tion­ships down south and with­in the com­mu­ni­ty is an expec­ta­tion of being inte­grat­ed into the com­mu­ni­ty; being hum­ble; and com­ing back. And so If I look at the peo­ple here who have come back mul­ti­ple times, I’ve told them: “I’m not let­ting you go”, but the idea of peo­ple com­ing in and going away once it’s great and it brings this lit­tle bolt of ener­gy, but that’s not sus­tain­able. So, If you are going to start build­ing rela­tion­ships with peo­ple, I feel that one of the strongest things you can do from the start is say­ing how long are you in this for. Are you in this one time ? And if you are, what is the val­ue in that ? There might be huge val­ue, but I think there’s longer val­ue and deep­er val­ue in more stay­ing pow­er; in build­ing things where peo­ple come back, or you go there. Then it builds and builds and builds.

-  I also think that anec­do­tal­ly there’s that attrac­tion right ? I think about Desirée Daw­son who came up for a res­i­den­cy in Folk [on the the rocks], she since, on her own dime came up two more times because she enjoys this place which I think is pret­ty cool. There’s a prece­dent to sug­gest that actu­al­ly, once peo­ple are out there they are like: “oh we could come back again…”.

-  That’s some­thing we can all do as well, we should have a lit­tle infor­mal orga­ni­za­tion who just show­ers vis­it­ing musi­cians with love.

(Everybody’s laugh­ing)

- Every­one is so nice here

- We do a great job of that! 

(Audi­ence agreeing)

- Car­men Braden: I mean just with the peo­ple here. There is already a lot of Edmon­ton con­nec­tions here. We just had four Edmon­to­ni­ans who came up.  Peo­ple go to school there. You guys hang out in Edmon­ton, you’re like the clas­si­cal cov­er band (jok­ing­ly talk­ing about the Gar­neau String Quar­tet). I call the TSO that (audi­ence Laugh­ing). For me this is a lit­tle seed that can grow roots.

-  I think artists […] [we do] a pret­ty good job of bring­ing north­ern artists up through dif­fer­ent res­i­den­cies, but also hav­ing north­ern artists go down into the oth­er ones… Just being part of the Folk on the Rocks res­i­den­cies, like Mo Ken­ney came up here, we did shows; same pro­gram as Désirée Daw­son, and I was like: “this is cool and I am real­ly hap­py to meet some­one and col­lab­o­rate and do all those things, but it would be cool if I could also go there.. The fund­ing is not set up to do that, and that would be true reci­procity I think. There’s a big draw to Yel­lowknife for sure because it’s remote, it’s this part of Cana­da that a lot of peo­ple don’t know, and we are real­ly suc­cess­ful in doing that. But I think in terms of that reci­procity, that also is impor­tant that we are putting our musi­cians out into the rest of Cana­da as well.

- I feel that musi­cians from Yel­lowknife, the North­west Ter­ri­to­ries, and the North in gen­er­al, have always such a unique­ness to the art that they cre­ate, think­ing of Leela Gil­day and Miran­da Cur­rie and a lot of peo­ple who start­ed in the north, stayed in the north, we just have a lit­tle bit of a dif­fer­ent approach to music and also just through the con­nec­tion to the North. I feel like send­ing you South to go talk to south­ern musi­cians and inter­act with peo­ple would be very valu­able to us and also for them because it’s a very unique point of view that we have.

This part of the dis­cus­sion was mod­er­at­ed by Rob Elo who shared his expe­ri­ence in par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Cana­di­an Music Incubator

-Rob Elo: I went down to do the Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor pro­gram which is in Toron­to, and that’s where I applied to do this pro­gram where they take musi­cians from all over the coun­try and basi­cal­ly, it’s a five week long busi­ness course about how to be a musi­cian in the mod­ern world, how to kind of explore all the avenues that you can make mon­ey with; and learn about all the dif­fer­ent types of peo­ple, pro­duc­ers, engi­neers, co-writ­ers, per­for­mance coach­es, video­g­ra­phers and every­body that you need to work with. How to work with these peo­ple and learn who they are, or at least who they are in the Toron­ton­ian com­mu­ni­ty. And that was a real­ly cool expe­ri­ence to go down there and do that and every­one in this pro­gram […], start­ed about twelve years ago, with this guy who is a pre­vi­ous Sony Exec who was like: “I want to help young musi­cians I want to give […]”.

- I did the pro­gram too. I was in Cal­gary last year.

- Rob Elo: I wan­na ask how [it went for you]. The way I felt about it, I felt like it was great and that every­one there, they real­ly want­ed to gen­uine­ly help. We are very far from where they are, it was real­ly help­ful for me to get in. Did you go ?

- Yes I went to Cal­gary, to Bell Stu­dio for five weeks.

- Rob Elo: Oh right on! You should total­ly talk about that too! My expe­ri­ence taught me so much about rights and roy­al­ties that I can get; It gave me a lot of ressources for actu­al con­tents. I filmed live per­for­mances videos, I did pho­to­shoot, I did col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing ses­sions with peo­ple. Made a lot of con­nec­tions. And every­one in the pro­gram was basi­cal­ly like, just call any­time […] every­one seemed real­ly excit­ed about Yel­lowknife. That was the thing when, when I was like, I’m from Yel­lowknife. I’m a pos­er. (Every­one laugh­ing) I’m not like the rest of you but now I’m mak­ing Yel­lowknife my home, and I’m so excit­ed to be here and work­ing with every­one. But I just got here, like, a cou­ple of years ago. So, I mean, some of you are true yel­lowknifers. Who can I think the rest of Cana­da is just so excit­ed about when­ev­er you men­tion Yel­lowknife. “Oh my god!”. I’m work­ing with this pro­duc­er, and he’s like, “so where are you from exact­ly?“, and I showed him on the map where’s Yel­lowknife. He’s like, “holy crap!” (Audi­ence laugh­ing). But I found that… and I’d love to get just every­one, espe­cial­ly, yeah, if peo­ple have done the pro­gram, could we use some­thing like that here? The nice thing about the pro­gram was it gave you, all these infor­ma­tion on rights and roy­al­ties, all these con­nec­tions, lists of peo­ple, list of grants you could apply for, or what peo­ple […] who are deep in the indus­try, who work with the Juno Awards and who are affil­i­at­ed with… They’re in every­thing, and again, trav­el­ing to places all over the coun­try to do these types of work­shops. Not Yel­lowknife yet, but maybe…  It was all kind of con­densed, and you’ve got a fold­er of, here’s all the con­tacts, here are the grants. Here’s all the orga­ni­za­tions. Here’s a plan that you can fol­low, where you can take what you choose, your direc­tion. Because as musi­cians, I find that it’s it’s not like: “and this is what you do? Oh, you want to be a musi­cian. Okay? It’s like, this. Like that.”  No! It can be crazy. It can be what­ev­er, and it can change at any time, depend­ing on what you want and depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion you’re in. And I feel they under­stood that. You’ve got one on one sit downs with peo­ple who are like: “Okay, here’s what you want to do. Okay, here are the peo­ple you want to meet”.

-  Quick ques­tion, you are ask­ing direct­ly if it would make sense to invite this same orga­ni­za­tion? To host a Yel­lowknife like week?

- Rob Elo: yeah

- Do you, from your expe­ri­ence of what you expe­ri­enced there, going back to this ques­tion of infra­struc­ture, do you think the pro­gram can run with the cur­rent infra­struc­ture that’s in Yellowknife?

- Rob Elo:  I think a ver­sion of it can, yeah,[…] I think every­thing you’re say­ing, we need more venues. We need more sup­port for venues and to have that sort of vibran­cy that a city should have, and where you can go to lots of places. And yes, there’s an awe­some cof­fee shop where they have folk music every week. And yes, there’s a bar type atmos­phere. And yes, there’s an all ages venue where kids who are inter­est­ed in what­ev­er type of music they are inter­est­ed in can host their own shows , and can have their friends come out and don’t get escort­ed out by secu­ri­ty. The thing about the Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor at first, I came in at quite a cool time, because they used to be out­side of Toron­to in this kind of enclosed space where they were doing every­thing in house. And so this was the ten years before I start­ed the pro­gram. I came in the twelfth year, and for ten years they were out­side of the city doing every­thing. Had a record­ing stu­dio in there. They had con­fer­ence rooms and writ­ing rooms and all this stuff. So they brought every­body in, and they could do all this stuff in there, and that was great. But one of the things that I got out of the pro­gram the most was that they moved it to right down­town. Their cen­tral office, they did­n’t have all that set up yet. So one of the things that we all had to do was trav­el all over the town to dif­fer­ent places that would host these things. We went into local music stu­dios, and we worked with local pro­duc­ers. We went to venues to do my live video. We went to a venue that had live shows all the time, and they were also set up to do a live video record­ing… And so you not only got the expe­ri­ence of work­ing with all these peo­ple and doing all these things. You got in the city. And I think it could be valu­able to be: “This is what Yel­lowknife is!”. Obvi­ous­ly under con­stant improve­ment, hope­ful­ly get­ting new venues and new places to do that. But if a pro­gram like that came up, maybe we could host it in dif­fer­ent places, in Yel­lowknife, and have local musi­cians, young, any­where in our musi­cal careers, doing things at dif­fer­ent places and see­ing how it could work. Does any­one have any opin­ions on that?

- Some­one actu­al­ly had one, like with CMI (Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor), four years ago, that was like a two day work­shop, did­n’t you? Did­n’t we? I have a pic­ture… (Peo­ple laughing)

-  The thing that I appre­ci­ate about that was that there were peo­ple there who were famil­iar with North­ern real­i­ties, right? And then there are peo­ple there who are famil­iar with, and very skilled about, Cana­di­an music indus­try busi­ness and roy­al­ties and all of those things. And I think that obvi­ous­ly […] on my mind is tour­ing, okay ? Like this is on my mind, I admit maybe no one else cares about it (Peo­ple laughing).They pro­vid­ed […] “you can go to FACTOR and you can do this, and you can do that”. Okay, if I want to go to Cal­gary com­mu­ni­ties, and this is how you would do it. But, if I want to do a north­ern tour in NWT, the logis­tics and the like, what­ev­er, of doing that, it’s almost impos­si­ble, unless you part­ner with NACC. […] Hav­ing a hybrid, kind of of CMI, and then folks who real­ly […] pull a lot of knowl­edge around, you know, grants and fund­ing. […]  And so doing a hybrid of “here’s the music indus­try.”. But then here’s the north­ern real­i­ties that I think don’t get addressed when we go to south­ern things. 

- Sure, yeah.

- So you’re talk­ing when you say tour­ing, you’re talk­ing specif­i­cal­ly about North­ern tour­ing or about going [South]. Both, yeah? 

- I would love to do a north­ern schools tour, for exam­ple, in all the dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, because I think the music that I make for kids is, you know… It’s a north­ern indige­nous music specif­i­cal­ly. Why would I not want to bring this mes­sage to school kids, right? And then, also bring­ing that to [reser­va­tions] and dif­fer­ent places down south and not. I’d also like to play soft seat the­aters. I’d also like to play… I want to know about the gamut of that […] how to actu­al­ly make that hap­pen with­out a book­ing agent, because I can’t get one.

- Sure, sure.

-  Well, yeah, I almost feel like, like […], even see­ing every­one here now, we could almost have the resources to make a pool. Pool the resources togeth­er. Because I know some peo­ple here know about the north­ern…  I cer­tain­ly, [peo­ple] have been amaz­ing as always, shar­ing infor­ma­tion about the grants that we can apply for, what they’re for. […] You have a lot of infor­ma­tion about this, about the dif­fer­ent places around Yel­lowknife, where they can host per­for­mances like that. Some folks have that infor­ma­tion. It’d be nice to have… CMI had all this in a nice lit­tle pack­age. And we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need CMI to do that for us, but if we could some­how ral­ly the troops and have kind of this, this acces­si­ble thing, you know, maybe in the form of a program.

- I think the hybrid is […] yeah, both of those things are cool

- What was the name of that program?

- Rob Elo: Cana­di­an Music incubator

- Cana­di­an music, egg that you hatch from, they hatch new music. 

- Rob Elo: That’s right, yeah (Audi­ence laugh­ing). I feel that. I don’t feel that I ful­ly hatched yet, do you have any expe­ri­ences you had of the program?

- I was super stoked to get into it […]. When I went, I was like: “Okay, this is the tick­et. This is the con­nec­tions that I need to do, the things that I need to do in order to get where I want to get.” […] I put a lot of weight in it. 

- Yeah.

- it’s a great pro­gram […] and I did make a lot of con­nec­tions. I think the thing that I came away with was, I had a lit­tle bit of like a midlife cri­sis after I got back from it to tell you the truth, because […] the folks who were in that pro­gram, they map out very clear­ly this cer­tain path­way to suc­cess and my path­way […]  looks a lot dif­fer­ent than what they mapped out as the path­way to suc­cess. And, I mean, that’s just me as a per­son. I just like doing hard things. (Every­one is laughing).

-  That is true. They def­i­nite­ly like, you know, they’re like “social media!”. So if you weren’t into social media…

-   I did after going there, I was on Face­book, and I hired a media per­son after­wards, and now I’m on Tik­Tok and Insta­gram […]. We cre­at­ed con­tent on a cal­en­dar, putting it out every week, we were able to cre­ate that con­tent six months in advance. So they taught me a lot of skills that way. […] and it’s up to me to keep that going, which I don’t real­ly. […] I’m just gonna be real­ly hon­est, because I think it’s impor­tant, and I think we all have these thoughts. I was like, “Wow! I’m just not as good as most of those oth­er peo­ple in the pro­gram […], they real­ly have some tal­ent!” […] they also, […]  most of the peo­ple I felt, looked a cer­tain way to be real­ly mar­ketable down there. And, I don’t look like that. That’s not me. And I came away feel­ing like: “Oh, my God, am I like, Am I doing the right thing, right?”.  And I think we all have that, which is why I just want to share that. We all have doubts some­where there. 

- Total­ly.

-  And then […] I’ve just felt like my voice was­n’t good enough. I did­n’t look the right way, and my social media sucked. That’s what I came out of that pro­gram know­ing. But it was, real­ly awe­some, because no one else would have told me that. 

-  Yeah, right. (Every­one is laughing)

-  And so then, last sum­mer, I spent the sum­mer in Van­cou­ver tak­ing pri­vate voice lessons from a teacher down there. […] You know: “Okay, I’m gonna improve my voice”. And I went and […] I have been learn­ing more about social media, and I still suck at it. I would hire that out.

-  Total­ly

-  100%

 —  I’ve spent the win­ter writ­ing two albums, like a new [album for] kids and a new [album for] adults, this thing […] talk­ing to peo­ple from that pro­gram, yeah, was real­ly help­ful. And being like: “hey, what do you think of this”. And hav­ing a real cri­tique, an artis­tic cri­tique of peo­ple’s work is real­ly valu­able as well. And you don’t need to go to that pro­gram to do that, but it did. It brought me down to build me back up.

- Rob Elo: Yeah. I felt the same, yeah. And I feel like […], this, you know, talk, or what­ev­er, talk­ing to all of you. I was like: “okay, I kind of struc­tured it out”. And, of course, it’s noth­ing like what I thought, but I think that a big theme of that was kind of musi­cal direc­tion and feel­ing. That’s why I took the pro­gram to begin with, I was like: “okay, what’s my direc­tion?”.  I spent so much time play­ing in bands, play­ing with oth­er peo­ple, being a part of a group, which I love, and I still do that, and it’s like the best thing ever, but I real­ly want­ed to have that musi­cal direc­tion for myself. To feel like I was tak­ing the reins a bit, and I did­n’t know exact­ly how to do that, and this, this was almost an alter­na­tive to for­mal edu­ca­tion, which is still total­ly awe­some and great. But it was like, some­thing […] “okay, you want to be a musi­cian and try some sort of alter­na­tive, writ­ing your own music that’s like, pop or rock cen­tric and doing that…”. So that was cool, but it def­i­nite­ly took me to that same place where I went. “Oh…” […]  It was great, because every­one in the pro­gram was kind of in that space, like a lot. Some peo­ple were amaz­ing. Some peo­ple I was : “Oh, my God, you’re so good!”. And then oth­er peo­ple […] maybe I did­n’t vibe with their music as much, but every­one had that feel­ing of: “What are we? Which way are we going?”. And I feel every­one had a reck­on­ing of sorts. Mine was in per­for­mance, and that’s why it’s so cool […] because I real­ized I play cov­er songs a lot, and I play in bands a lot. I love the music that I play in bands, and I love play­ing cov­er music and groov­ing and stuff like that. And I real­ized because we had sev­er­al per­for­mances that we had to do, which I think is a great thing for any­one to do, we had per­for­mances that we had to do in front of the whole team. We had the live per­for­mance video, we did a mock show­case per­for­mance at the end, where every­one did a set. And I real­ized that just me as a solo per­form­ing. I’ve been doing back­ground music for so long[…]. I don’t know how it feels to just be me doing, putting on a show. And I real­ized I did­n’t like my music the way I played it, [the way] I was play­ing it for peo­ple. […] It was my own epiphany. And I was like: “Oh my God!”. It was a per­for­mance coach who kind of told me that […] you have to find what you real­ly enjoy, and then that can trans­late to peo­ple[…]. The pro­gram kind of helped me notice where, whether it was by what they told me, what I had to fig­ure out of my own. […] Just so much immer­sion with all these musi­cians, all these dif­fer­ent peo­ple, what I need­ed to work on, what and where I want­ed to go […] and I felt despair in some ways, but it was good. it has been lead­ing to…

-  To the Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor and despair! (Every­one is laughing)

- Exact­ly, incu­ba­tor of despair!

(peo­ple laughing)

-  I think, if I were to offer some­thing to folks in the group, is that this came out of that for me too. […] I worked with [sev­er­al peo­ple] quite a bit to real­ly hone what I want­ed my music to be and come up […] I thought of this, like, a the­sis state­ment.  because I do kids stuff and I do adult stuff, right? […] The exam­ple for me: “Oh, I cre­ate authen­tic north­ern indige­nous con­tent that is acces­si­ble to chil­dren and fam­i­lies” […] and try­ing to tell peo­ple, what kind of music do you play, right? That’s always real­ly hard. But if you can have some­thing sol­id and suc­cinct around that; it takes a lot of back­ground work to go into your­self as a musi­cian and be like: “What am I about? What do I want to be about?”. And then have that line. I think if every per­son in this room came up with that, we’d all be bet­ter musicians.

-  Yeah, Yeah.

- Rob Elo: […] I picked up a lot of things from the pro­gram, but the dif­fer­ent rights orga­ni­za­tions that you can reg­is­ter your orig­i­nal music with, and all the dif­fer­ent sources of fund­ing that can come in, [it’s] real­ly impor­tant now, to mem­o­rize them (Jok­ing­ly). Every­one has heard of SOCAN, right?

-  Not every­one. 

- Rob Elo: Okay, so, SOCAN is this orga­ni­za­tion where you can put your music, you can reg­is­ter your music there and get roy­al­ties from them. Get quar­ter­ly pay­ments for every time your music is played. […] you can get paid when it’s played and streamed in ways that you know, not just your pub­lish­er, your music pub­lish­er will give you. But basi­cal­ly, Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor ham­mered in for me that every time I would always for­get to reg­is­ter with SOCAN. […] I played in lots of bands when I was grow­ing up, and we nev­er had SOCAN accounts.[…] We were just like: “that’s a mys­te­ri­ous kind of thing that I don’t want to be con­cerned about…”. But you can go to SOCAN web­site, you can sign your­self up, and any­thing you’ve writ­ten, any­thing you’ve been a part of with oth­er bands, you can put all your all your music on there, and then any­time that music is played or used, you’re going to get paid for it.  And one of the things they kind of ham­mered home about that, is you nev­er know when these things are going to come up, where your music might be used or might be played, and if you’re not set up prop­er­ly, then it’s gonna bite you when you don’t get paid. […] One of the things I don’t know is, does any­one else here play in projects like bands, […] sce­nar­ios where there’s splits going on ? […] Who gets what?

- Yeah, I think that’s one of the big things that, whether it’s about work­ing with bands or play­ing in the band, is that that dis­cus­sion hap­pens as ear­ly as pos­si­ble for trans­paren­cy. Because if some­thing is bring­ing in a fair amount of mon­ey, you want to make sure that every­one knows who is going to get what and you’re not try­ing to fig­ure that out at the wrong time. 

- Rob Elo: Yes, exact­ly. That’s def­i­nite­ly, again, talk­ing about what was said, I real­ized that. And now I’m doing my own solo stuff, and so I’m gear­ing up to every bit of music I release, I’m going to reg­is­ter it with all these places that I’ll talk fur­ther about. But from bands I’ve been in that have got­ten plays in var­i­ous areas, I’m going: “Ah! We nev­er talked about that!”. And so it’s great to always talk about the splits of things. One of the things that struck me when I was doing my inter­view for CMI and the pro­gram, because they call me: “Hey, you’re one of the appli­cants we’re con­sid­er­ing. Can we talk to you more about what you do and how you’d be suit­ed for this.” And they ask you a bunch of ques­tions and one is: “What are the rights you’re enti­tled to. Do you know about that stuff?”. I know about Socan for some rea­son, but that’s about it. You can sign up for SOCAN for your song­writ­ing cred­its but you can also sign up for your pub­lish­ing rights as well and that’s a dif­fer­ent process to sign up for this. So those are the song­writ­ing rights that you have. 

On the oth­er side, you have your record­ings, so you can reg­is­ter the record­ings of your music, the mechan­i­cal piece every time your song is played on radio […]. When­ev­er they [CMI] talk about your music being played, they talk about it as a per­for­mance, which I thought was inter­est­ing, because you only think of live per­for­mance, but it’s actu­al­ly a per­for­mance dig­i­tal­ly, too. […] And there’s also the Mas­ters side, how your record­ing is financed. That’s anoth­er area of your rights.

So I found it real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing learn­ing about all these things. I have a to do list now for all my music, and you kind of just have to. It does make you feel, […] when you have this list of where you can reg­is­ter all your music, to get all your dif­fer­ent rights, it does feel like you’re mak­ing progress. Because, […] you have your bases cov­ered. When you’re doing these steps, these actu­al, […] con­crete steps to mak­ing sure that, on the back end, your music is actu­al­ly going to be mak­ing you mon­ey, and that you’ll be ready if your music sud­den­ly gets picked up by [some­body] in some way. And if you start get­ting a lot of plays, you’ll be ready to receive those royalties. 

- Just on that very same top­ic. I inter­ject here, I wish to brag a wee lit­tle bit, because of SOCAN, I make about $100 a year from SOCAN. Some­body some­where, I don’t know who or where, is play­ing my music. […] It’s gonna have to be radio, because I don’t have any videos or what­ev­er. So it’s going to be radio, but some­where in the world, and that’s been in New­found­land, and it’s been in Nova Sco­tia, and it’s been in New Zealand, and it’s been in Poland, and var­i­ous places around the world that have played me some­how, So SOCAN found out that my music has been played. Now $100 a year is going to buy you a box of beer or some­thing, right? But it’s bet­ter than absolute­ly noth­ing, and it means that some­body some­where out there is play­ing or lis­ten­ing to your music. So if you haven’t done it already, you know, get on there. It’s my advice for what it’s worth,

-  I don’t think you said it explic­it­ly, but the oth­er side of song­writ­ing is, if you’re not a song­writer, but you’re a musi­cian in a record­ing of an album, which can hap­pen for a lot of peo­ple. That’s oth­er roy­al­ties you can col­lect. It’s almost like you’re dou­ble dip­ping, if you’re a song­writer and you’re play­ing on the album, singing… 

- Exact­ly. 

- Those are dif­fer­ent pots of mon­ey you can access.

- Rob Elo: Exact­ly. Yeah, that’s right. And every­one who’s on record­ing [might be] deserv­ing of rights. So yeah that’s the inter­est­ing thing. When you’re […] a sole pro­pri­etor, essen­tial­ly, when it’s your music and you’re mak­ing record­ings and you’re doing all this, you have access to all those rights. If you have a record com­pa­ny and they own your mas­ters or what­ev­er, you know you’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly col­lect­ing rights. They are col­lect­ing the roy­al­ties for a par­tic­u­lar por­tion. Anoth­er thing I want to talk about is sync licens­ing and get­ting your music in shows and in movies and things like that. […] Have any of you had your music in movies ?

(Some of the par­tic­i­pants are nodding)

Yeah, that’s so cool! I’d love to hear about that expe­ri­ence, because what I’ve heard and learned from CMI and from oth­er friends of mine who’ve had this hap­pen is that a lot of the time for sync licens­ing… And they call it sync­ing because you’re syn­chro­niz­ing your music to video[…]  but it’ll be kind of on a dime, where if you have a ver­sion of your song, you should have it instru­men­tal too. If there are vocals, you should have these ver­sions ready to go, because if a TV show or a movie wants to choose your music. They’re going to be say­ing: “Hey, we want to sub­mit it. We want to use this and get it going, like, tomor­row. So can you give me the wav files? Can you give me the mp3 files and all the files that we need?”. So, if you don’t have your music pre­pared and orga­nized like: “Okay, here’s the instru­men­tal ver­sion, here’s the clean ver­sion, here’s all this stuff.” You’re going to miss an oppor­tu­ni­ty. Has any­one had that experience?

-  I’ve kind of had the oppo­site [expe­ri­ence] in terms of rela­tion­ship build­ing and know­ing… Because some projects start off as friends: “Oh, we’ll just do this, this and this, and it’s not for­mal.” . But I think I do need to learn a lot more about this, because some songs that I’ve made have end­ed up on shows and I had no idea because of the rela­tion­ship part of who I’ve lent or let some­one else hold my own music. So it’s the paper­work… I’ve learned friends are not just friends, you know, right? 

- So, did you sign, sign off on your music so some­body else could con­trol that and give it…

- No, no, they just did. It was a small town, old high school friends, and prob­a­bly should have got that on paper.

-  Strict­ly speak­ing, although this isn’t much help, you own the copy­right to a song. As soon as you write it, you don’t have to apply for it. You don’t have to sign it up in any way. Sim­ply by writ­ing it, you own it. All you have to do is be able to prove that at the right time.  Be that as it may, it’s def­i­nite­ly, def­i­nite­ly some­thing that should show up if you’re going to record a CD or what­ev­er, and you’re going to write it down: “This song is by John Smith, SOCAN, or John Smith pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny”.. That sort of thing is worth doing. You know, no mat­ter how much you trust your friends and so forth, it’s always very worth­while to make sure that your name is on it some­how, somewhere. 

- Well, when you’re in your ear­ly 20s and you don’t know. I did­n’t even real­ize that SOCAN was a thing, or that you can sign up for these things.

- Well, that’s the thing. I’m sor­ry. I remem­ber think­ing this when I was tak­ing the pro­gram and I’m in my 30s. I was like: “Oh, my God, I would have loved this when I was 20 some­thing!”. Get­ting start­ed with, keep all your files, orga­nize your rights when your song is writ­ten, have it in that fold­er that’s “this is the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the record­ing” in addi­tion to sign­ing up for SOCAN and reg­is­ter­ing it. That’s some­thing that should always be done.

- I think with SOCAN, and I think with MROC (Musi­cians’ Rights Orga­ni­za­tion Cana­da) too, it can be set up so that when you put in your infor­ma­tion, there’s a retroac­tive piece, yeah? I don’t know how far back it’s going right now. 

-  I did it, and it goes, it goes back, like, I think a year or two…

-  They used to go back like just a few years ago. They go back into the 90s. 

- Oh, my god, yeah?

- I think so. 

- Anoth­er inter­est­ing piece that I found out through CMI also was that they found me sur­prise mon­ey, which was real­ly awe­some! [Peo­ple laugh­ing]. So in terms of per­for­mances I’ve played for, say, folk on the rocks, for exam­ple. Every set list that is played is reg­is­tered to SOCAN, and then SOCAN pays out that per­for­mance that you made. So major fes­ti­vals, venues, maybe it’s not the bar down the road who does that. But I would say prob­a­bly most soft seat the­aters would do that and so when went back and looked for those per­for­mances, there was like, sev­en of them for me, and they were like: “Oh, you get, like — I think, you know, not much — maybe 250 or 300 bucks pay­out!”. or some­thing like that.  But if you’re not even reg­is­tered, they might have still reg­is­tered your songs for you. So when you join SOCAN, you may have some per­for­mances sit­ting there that haven’t had roy­al­ties claimed on. That’s right and you can upload setlists.

- Car­men Braden: Okay so Long­shad­ow moment here. As the host of Long­shad­ow, I have a respon­si­bil­i­ty, I know so you and you and you (jok­ing­ly point­ing musi­cians around the room)We’ve got some work to do still, because I don’t know what set, what the names of your songs are from your set. You either have to send that to SOCAN, or you have to tell me, and I have to send it to SOCAN. And there’s always been, for me as a com­pos­er, this: “No, it’s your job. No, it’s your job!”. Who’s actu­al­ly respon­si­ble? So maybe the Gar­neau could even pitch in here. When you guys do a con­cert, do you reg­is­ter your set list with SOCAN? Or do you trust the venue to, or do you expect the com­pos­er to know when you play your works? […] 

- Well, that’s why it’s prob­a­bly our respon­si­bil­i­ty as artists. 

- Car­men Braden: It’s a bit of a shared one too. […] Hold each oth­er account­able. So like, if you play some­where, you should ask them, like, who’s reg­is­ter­ing this with SOCAN? Did you buy the license for it? […] My code of con­duct is that I’ve tried to, like, up the busi­ness game for what I’m doing in Yel­lowknife, and make it a lit­tle less [about] my friends. We can be friends, but we’re work­ing togeth­er, and when and if it goes sour, we’re gonna be pro­fes­sion­al. So, we keep each oth­er account­able, and that’s what I think I need a lit­tle more of in this town too, is like oth­er peo­ple learn­ing about this and hold­ing each oth­er to account, so I don’t miss three years of reg­is­ter­ing peo­ple’s songs. I should do it tomor­row, but I’m gonna be tired (every­one is laugh­ing). I’m curi­ous, Gar­neau, what do you guys do when you go and play?

- We gen­er­al­ly just trust that the venues are doing it right.

- And it depends very much on which music that we play. 

- Why would it depend? 

- Well, Mozart’s fam­i­ly’s not get­ting paid out. (Every­body is laughing)

- But it’s a good point. I think we should let the com­posers know every time we per­form their music, because I think you have to be a mem­ber of SOCAN to…

- And you have to have your song reg­is­tered, yes? So if you just wrote a new song yes­ter­day, and it’s not reg­is­tered and say it’s on the set list, you haven’t reg­is­tered it. You’re not going to get mon­ey for it.

- No but it’s retroactive.

- They’re expect­ing the mem­bers to do the work. So for us, we can tell the com­posers that we’re performing. 

- That’s always real­ly appreciated.

- That’s a good point, because we don’t alway have the reflex of doing that. 

- No, I don’t think about this all the time.

- Nor­mal­ly, it would be con­nect­ed to the actu­al sheet music process, right? 

- Offi­cial­ly, my under­stand­ing is it’s the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the venue. It can be us that kind of fol­lows up with them and just checks in if it’s a venue that we think might not have things up to date, but it’s the venue’s responsibility

-  But they might not want to pay that licensing 

- Exact­ly! 

- Then you get into some awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions there.

- I was pro­gram­ming  for a con­cert that I did in May. And we played a Dutch piece by a Dutch com­pos­er who has passed away, but not that long ago. So I bought the music, and I had to buy a license with the sheet music for a per­for­mance on that date. So the music that I down­loaded said at the bot­tom: “licensed to be per­formed on May so and so…”, and I hap­pened to be the great grand­daugh­ter of this com­pos­er. So then my fam­i­ly kept like, you know, three euros for that performance.

- (Jok­ing­ly) Rea­son to cel­e­brate right ? 

(Every­body laughs)

- Car­men Braden: We have only like, 10 more min­utes left, and I kind of don’t real­ly want our awe­some con­ver­sa­tion to end on roy­al­ties. Could I ask maybe some of the col­lab­o­ra­tors in the room just to talk about what that process has been like dur­ing the Long­shad­ow fes­ti­val. So either the song­writ­ers, com­posers, arrangers or the per­form­ers. Just in that idea of rela­tion­ship build­ing and sus­tain­abil­i­ty, how what you’ve done here res­onates? What are you maybe going to take away from this time?

•  I split my time between Edmon­ton and Yel­lowknife, most­ly in Yel­lowknife now, and I am very grate­ful to have four new friends in Edmon­ton. Of course, the artists that I got to work with this week­end as well. It’s a small town, and maybe I’ve seen your faces before, but now I feel like I know these peo­ple. It’s a pret­ty inti­mate con­nec­tion to work on your song for a week, and I just sit there and lis­ten to your voice over and over and over again (peo­ple are laugh­ing). It’s not a bad thing at all. It’s a real­ly won­der­ful thing, but, you know, I had to just lis­ten to your song that many times. So that’s a unique expe­ri­ence for me to be able to real­ly immerse myself with these artists for a chunk of time, and then I’ll walk away from that song for a lit­tle while, and I’ll lis­ten to it enough that it gets stuck in my head. Because then, usu­al­ly when it’s stuck in my head and I’m singing in the show­er, that’s when the oth­er lines start to emerge. “Oh, okay, that’ll be cool in the high reg­is­ter of the vio­la!” because, it’s more nasal­ly and I sound nasal­ly in the show­er, (every­one is laugh­ing) and it’s this whole wild ride. A lot of peo­ple ask me through the process, how long does it take to write a song? 

•  I asked you that 17 times I think.

• And I was like I don’t know. I could prob­a­bly smash one out in eight hours if we had to, but ide­al­ly it’s eight hours over, like 16 small chunks of time. Where I can spend some time in between let­ting things steep and fer­ment and change. Any­way, my take­away is that over­all I’m grate­ful to real­ly get to meet some peo­ple on a per­son­al lev­el through the music. So thanks for hav­ing me along for that.

•  Yeah, It’s just such an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. I was just over­whelmed grate­ful­ness for you arrang­ing the songs, for Car­men putting this togeth­er, and all of you in the string quar­tet for doing it. One of my favorite moments was when we had played it a cou­ple of times, and at first it was like, you know, me and a string quar­tet play­ing the thing along to it, and then as we played it and lis­tened to each oth­er, and then got ideas and made sev­er­al tweaks. I got a feel for when things were hap­pen­ing and play­ing over the piano in the sec­ond verse and every­thing. It was just like,“whoa!”. That was real­ly when you got the cel­lo line of the rhythm that I had in the left hand, […] that’s so that’s so great. Yeah, it was just such an amaz­ing feel­ing. It’s one of those, again, I was feel­ing stag­nant in play­ing my own music and this was def­i­nite­ly a rem­e­dy. Like, “Oh, this can be great, yeah?”. Just a thrilling expe­ri­ence that makes me see my music in a dif­fer­ent light. 

• Yeah, that was so amaz­ing. I don’t know if all the artists that col­lab­o­rat­ed with the audio got the same feel­ing as me. I remem­ber 2013, 2014 I used to play in a band in Brazil. It’s not the same thing when you just have a gui­tar or key­board and you play in solo, but when you play with a full band. For me, I feel you breathe real­ly nice, and then you feel the enve­lope, […] it gives you that con­fi­dence. […]You feel you’re in a dif­fer­ent world. But that is the feel­ing I get, you know, that was so amaz­ing. That’s why I can’t wait to play with a band. […] That was so nice guys and you did a good job, and then to arrange the music. […] And then that was so nice and thank you, Thank you!

• I feel like it was a very mean­ing­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion for all of us. The four of us, we play in the Edmon­ton Sym­pho­ny as well. And I feel like… Oh, now I’ve paint­ed myself into a corner.I guess. (Every­body laughs) I just think the ide­al when peo­ple get togeth­er and play music togeth­er, is that they go in with open hearts and lis­ten and are open to one anoth­er. And I think when we all leave, we’re all a lit­tle bit rich­er in hav­ing had the expe­ri­ence. So that’s what it felt like to me. It was real­ly great. And some­times not, not all the time does it feel that way, but cer­tain­ly with the Quar­tet and with all of you, is just yeah, that’s, that’s kind of what I take away from it, is just meaningful…

• (Abrupt­ly ask­ing) Did you have fun? 

• Yeah, we had a lot of fun. 

• There you go! You win! You win! 

• Yeah!

• I would like to add to that 100 years ago, when I was a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian, I did get a few gigs with the Edmon­ton sym­pho­ny, and the lev­el of play­ing is amaz­ing, but the expe­ri­ence is a bit scary. You’re just scared of mak­ing a mis­take, and the ama­teur music I’ve done here at a much low­er lev­el is just done for the sheer love of music. So you’re kind of free from hav­ing to pay your rent from play­ing music. And those expe­ri­ences, they’re bet­ter. You know, you’re not play­ing at the same lev­el as you did at a pro­fes­sion­al lev­el, but the right spir­it is there, and you’re just doing it because you love music, and I think it’s chal­leng­ing in your occu­pa­tion to keep that love in doing what you do. 

• I can assure you we make lots of mistakes. 

• (Everybody’s laugh­ing)

• Yes, I just want to add to that too. I mean, dis­cus­sion here has been, you know, sup­port­ing musi­cians at a pro­fes­sion­al lev­el, but we’ve got peo­ple here that came through the music edu­ca­tion sys­tem in the ter­ri­to­ries, and right now, we’ve changed music cur­ricu­lum, and it’s at a kind of a pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion as to whether music edu­ca­tion in the schools is going to be done to the same lev­el, and unless you’ve got music edu­ca­tion in the schools, then you’re not going to have the peo­ple around here. I’m part of the music teach­ers asso­ci­a­tion […] I’m try­ing to get to the schools, so that we real­ly do have pro­fes­sion­al music being taught in schools. And it also reminds me of a cou­ple of things. One is that they can also teach, you know, at the high­er lev­els, that there are these career aspects to it;  there is a busi­ness aspect to being a musi­cian, as well as a cit­i­zen­ship aspect. And that whole thing of how impor­tant it is, of lis­ten­ing, of coop­er­at­ing with oth­ers, of hav­ing an open heart, of cre­ativ­i­ty. I mean, aren’t those things so impor­tant for kids, right? And that starts at the school lev­el, and then kids join bands with their class­mates and go on to take music in uni­ver­si­ty and things like that.

•  But there’s anoth­er area of advo­ca­cy for an orga­ni­za­tion like yours, right at the edu­ca­tion right at grade six, grade sev­en, get an instru­ment in their hands.

• Grade One and two get an Instru­ment in their hands, grade one and two!

•  I think that the thing I’m hear­ing is, I’ve been lucky to have the shared expe­ri­ence of cre­at­ing music with oth­ers and there’s noth­ing like it in life. I think every child should have that oppor­tu­ni­ty to do it. And I think that that sort of grass­roots from the very bot­tom up is […]. My hypoth­e­sis now is that it’s some­thing that music NWT can sup­port. And from, think­ing back to your gov­ern­ment ques­tion, like, how can the gov­ern­ment sup­port this? The ideas that have come out here, like spaces, per­for­mance spaces, rehearsal spaces. The infra­struc­ture is not yet in place, but I think there is a tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ty, because of the skill and the tal­ent and the authen­tic­i­ty of the artists here, that Yel­lowknife could be, or could aim to have a brand of music and a vibrant music scene that is attract­ing peo­ple from around the world. 

There’s a research project about North­ern and remote com­mu­ni­ties around the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit of music. Reyk­javik, Daw­son City, you know, like there are places that have done this before. You know, the quin­tes­sen­tial exam­ple is Nashville. Like, every­one knows what Nashville means, right? It’s like it’s a mec­ca for musi­cians. So I won­der, from a gov­ern­ment point of view, it’s one thing to give out grants for, you know, more devel­oped per­form­ers to go down south, but like there is I think the larg­er oppor­tu­ni­ty  to cre­ate a place where peo­ple can come and every­one who I’ve [met], who have trav­eled from else­where to come here and play, have this feel­ing of, “Wow, this is a spe­cial place…. And there are spe­cial tour­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties here. The snow­cas­tle Fes­ti­val, I think, is unique in the world, and that any­one who’s come through there is like, “Wow, holy sh*t. This is incred­i­ble!” . And so devel­op­ing those oppor­tu­ni­ties for per­for­mance spaces and rehearsal spaces, like peo­ple are rent­ing stor­age lock­ers here to rehearse, that’s insane. So I think from a gov­ern­ment point of view, if I was sit­ting in gov­ern­ment or you’re the may­or, Pre­mier, the Prime Min­is­ter… They have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to devel­op cul­ture, because there is eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit, I think that’s clear. 

But also they’re in a posi­tion to influ­ence cor­po­rate cul­ture, the enter­prise, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, who are extract­ing resources from this coun­try and not giv­ing any­thing back. So if I were in the gov­ern­men­t’s posi­tion, I would have poli­cies in place, not only to have them man­dat­ed to sup­port arts because of all the ben­e­fits. Not just the artis­tic mer­it of kids, but the trans­fer­able skills that you devel­op learn­ing how to play an instru­ment. I don’t know any oth­er way of doing that mat­ter. And so, back to the sus­tain­abil­i­ty piece, like, why are cor­po­ra­tions not putting mon­ey for­ward to help tour­ing be more sus­tain­able, from a car­bon impact point of view? There are min­ing com­pa­nies here with mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars. I don’t see any of their logos on any of our projects here. That is sort of the col­lec­tive action that  if I think about Yel­lowknife here, like, yeah, we don’t have that much indus­try, we don’t have that much busi­ness. But if we were to expand this con­ver­sa­tion across the coun­try, every arts musi­cian or orga­ni­za­tion is like: “no, we’re not going to f*cking do arts and cul­ture unless you put in your part here.”. Like, there’s an impact to doing this. There’s an impact for our coun­try and our soci­ety as a whole.  That is the aspect of this world we live in that is not con­tribut­ing. They’re not putting in their fair part. So that’s what I would say to polit­i­cal pow­ers if I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty.  And hope­ful­ly on the record here, this will be read by every sin­gle one of them.

- I also want to add on to that, this idea that if we were to devel­op and real­ly have an end goal of  cre­at­ing Yel­lowknife as, like, a sort of musi­cal mec­ca, like a Daw­son City or a Sackville or, these places in Cana­da, there seems to be that attrac­tion to go and make music in these kinds of more rur­al place. One of the things that I have to say is,  there needs to be that col­lab­o­ra­tion and that atten­tion and that focus with con­nect­ing to the Dene and Inu­it peo­ple and Métis.  Because I know that so many peo­ple who are com­ing up, they say: “wow, this cul­ture is so much more alive here than any­where else in Cana­da!”. And, if there is to be that end goal, that needs to be explic­it­ly put in. […] That needs to be so explic­it­ly writ­ten into the end goal because not only is it impor­tant on an eth­i­cal stand­point, it’s as far as a brand­ing thing, it’s some­thing that’s unique. And the same way that I’ve heard so many artists come up here, just Indige­nous, non-Indige­nous artists come here and say, what a spe­cial place. I’ve heard so many Indige­nous peo­ple come up here from oth­er nations and be like, “holy sh*t, like, what is hap­pen­ing here?”. And I think we can’t lose that in the process if we are to make or build that.

- I have some­thing about this. But I think there is some­thing, when you’re talk­ing about the music, I think music could be one thing. […] it could be one thing and then could unite a lot of peo­ple around it. I think we can use that and then to devel­op our music here. That is not to focus on just one cul­ture, but we can mix every­thing togeth­er.  And then to show music could reunite peo­ple togeth­er. […] I’m some­one who does­n’t have cul­ture, because the cul­ture of the world is my cul­ture. […] Then every­where I am, I’m like water. And then if you put me in that cup, I’m going to take the form of this cup. That’s the way I am. […] I meet peo­ple here from dif­fer­ent places all over the world. And then we can put our­selves togeth­er and then make music in maybe dif­fer­ent lan­guages and dif­fer­ent cul­tures and then mix every­thing. Because we’re not going to do music just for Yel­lowknife, just for Cana­da. Nowa­days, the music is some­thing good all over the world. You know. Then that’s why for me, I think we need to put the cul­ture togeth­er, put the rhythms of music togeth­er.  For exam­ple, you can in just one music find dif­fer­ent rhythms inside one song.That is a project […] I’m think­ing about work­ing on it. […] And then if we have a Christ­mas song, and then many peo­ple, and then they talk about dif­fer­ent things, but around the same sub­ject, but in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. To show all we can be togeth­er for one thing, for one reason. 

- I think we’re get­ting close to time. 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: I’ve been main­ly ask­ing ques­tions but I feel this con­ver­sa­tion also makes me want to maybe share a bit more of my musi­cal and com­mu­ni­ty expe­ri­ences on every­thing that has been said here too. […] We’ve talked about the stress and the pres­sure of best prac­tices, which is a lot of what we’ve been talk­ing about: the idea of indus­try. But a lot of peo­ple don’t do music for the indus­try. From where I, my music, or the music of the scene I come from, which is large­ly exper­i­men­tal, large­ly very weird by nature or unusu­al. Every­body might like to make a liv­ing with music, but it’s just not pos­si­ble. Even with my music, most of the peo­ple that I work with, we are prag­mat­ic about the fact that we might get gigs some­times and every­thing, but it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the end goal.

 It’s about fos­ter­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice. It’s about fos­ter­ing links and also the acces­si­bil­i­ty to these prac­tices. I was here, just with my [portable audio] recorder. I think kids would also ben­e­fit, for exam­ple, to be exposed to field record­ing prac­tices here because the [envi­ron­ment] is so unique. You could go in nature […]. I think it’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at music too. Even like clas­si­cal, you know, string music, as some­body who’s a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian, I know this is inac­ces­si­ble to me […] because I start­ed music too late and I come from anoth­er back­ground. But you can intro­duce peo­ple to dif­fer­ent ways of mak­ing music  and dif­fer­ent ways of approach­ing it. […] I think here you have this already. And that’s kind of what I felt. There’s so many dif­fer­ent streams of prac­tice and ways of doing it. I think this is what’s so great about it is that a lot of peo­ple can find their own way into it.[…] In my com­mu­ni­ty, we build our own venues most of the time, kind of like what you did here [dur­ing the fes­ti­val] you know. In Mon­tre­al, lots of the places I play would be DIY venues. So for exam­ple, a SOCAN license is just not think­able [in such venues] there’s also chal­lenges about these things. I think here [in Yel­lowknife] there’s a lot of things that res­onat­ed with me and with my expe­ri­ence of music, to just be able to sus­tain it, find space to do it, get peo­ple engaged, find new ways to maybe engage [with] it as a com­mu­ni­ty. I just want­ed to say thank you for let­ting me see some of that work; to hear and engage in that prac­tice with you for a week. So for that I want to thank you [all] very much. 

Com­ple­men­tary Informations:

APTN Nation­al Indige­nous Music Impact Study can be con­sult­ed here:

https://www.aptnnews.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Music-Impact-Study.pdf

ATTI!  Indige­nous Artists Col­lec­tive Research Sum­ma­ry can be con­sult­ed here:

http://www.atticollective.com/uploads/3/4/9/4/34945811/2023aug_researchsummary.pdf

More infor­ma­tions on SOCAN and on the Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor can be found here:

CNMN would like to thank:

Car­ly Mcfad­den, Tere­sa Horosko and Folks on the rocks

Mike Auty and Music NWT

Bran Ram and West­ern Arc­tic Mov­ing Pictures 

Tanya Snow and ATTI! Indige­nous Artists Collective

Batiste Foisy

Mar­tin Rehak

Pablo Sar­a­van­ja 

CNMN would like to thank and con­grat­u­late all the artists and musi­cians for their inspir­ing performances:

Cas­san­dra Blondin-Burt 

Ryan McCord

LJJ

Rob Elo

Kathryn Louise Oraas 

Kay Sibbe­ston 

Gar­neau String Quar­tet  (Robert Uchi­da , Lau­ra Veeze, Kei­th Hamm, Julie Hereish)

Andrew Ball

CNMN would also like to thank Peter Skin­ner, the tech­ni­cal crew and all the vol­un­teer of the fes­ti­val for let­ting CNMN con­tribute to the tech­ni­cal side of the festival.