Healthy times for Canadian music
p2pnet news | Music:- The official Canadian Music Week won’t take place until March in Toronto, but this week the Canadian government has staged its own Canadian music week.
Days after the release of the Industry Canada commissioned study on the correlation between P2P and CD sales, Statistics Canada has just released a report on the state of the sound recording and music publishing industries in Canada.
Notwithstanding the doom and gloom from industry associations, Statistics Canada paints a much different picture.
According to Statscan, “Canada’s sound recording and music publishing industries turned a relatively healthy profit in 2005, despite the worldwide decline in record sales and increased competition from other forms of entertainment.”
Highlights from the release include:
- each of the three major segments of the Canadian music industry (record production, music publishing, and recording studios) turned a profit in 2005
- operating profit was estimated at 14 percent for the industry
- the recording industry’s revenues declined from 2003 to 2005, but profitability increased from 0.1 percent to 7 percent. Global restructuring, lowered costs, and digital distribution were cited as the primary reasons for the profit increase.
The news was also very good for Canadian artists. Their sales increased by 3.3 percent and now account for 21 percent of total Canadian music sales. Even more noteworthy, Canadian artists continued to release more music – an increase of 8.8 percent, while foreign artists (those backed by the CRIA) dropped by 5.6 percent.
In other words, while the CRIA was giving dire speeches in 2005 claiming that Canadian artists could not find labels to invest in them, the data show that the market for Canadian artists was growing with more releases and more revenues.
Michael Geist
[Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He can be reached by email at mgeist[at]uottawa.ca and is on-line at www.michaelgeist.ca.]
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for the download, and here for details. Click here or here to learn how to by-pass censorship in your area.
