AS HEARD ON...
Matt Webb & Mike Ayley of
MARIANAS TRENCH
For the full interview, listen to the Feb. 20, 2019 episode
CM: The full lineup of Marianas Trench has been
together now for 15 years. How have the dynamics
between you changed as you’ve grown up, and how
have you kept it together in an enjoyable and
productive way?
Mike Ayley: I think the common denominator has been
keeping a sense of humour, because it’s never just a
paved road. There are so many sidetracks and detours and
hurdles and all these things that get in the way of you and
your collective goal. If you let them bring you down, it’ll
crush you and you’re probably not going to stick around
that long. But we just sit together and cheer each other up
and laugh about it and kind of laugh about everything. We
definitely do a lot of that. And then we talk about the same
stories for years and years!
Matt Webb: Yeah, when somebody has a piece of new material and brings it
to the group…
Ayley: People coming running, like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, a new story?! I don’t
want to miss it!”
Webb: [laughs] Yeah, the road is so repetitive. It’s the same thing over and
over again. You ask how things have changed and, well, they haven’t. You
know, we’re all older and have families and this and that, but between the four
of us, it’s pretty damn similar to how it was 15 years ago.
DMG Clearances President
DEBORAH
MANNIS-GARDNER
For the full interview, listen to the Feb. 13, 2019 episode
CM: Often, the best lessons come
from making mistakes. Whether
it’s a story from someone you’ve
worked with or that you’ve heard
second-hand, do any examples
come to mind of what might hap-
pen if artists don’t take sample
clearances seriously enough?
Mannis-Gardner: We’re not seeing
cease-and-desist like we used to back
in the day of the Biz Markie situation
[in 1991, for not obtaining clearance on a sample in the track
“Alone Again”]. You are seeing some of these lawsuits getting
attention like the Robin Thicke “Blurred Lines” situation, people
going after Ed Sheeran, people going after Taylor Swift. If you
notice, those don’t include master uses; those are publishing
uses, and some of them are open to interpretation. What we’re
dealing with [regarding clearances] is sometimes you’re working
with a major artist and clearing something at the same time
they’re releasing it, and they’ve got that really thick wad of mon-
ey to be able to pay off the sample copyright holders at a higher
rate than someone clearing something prior to release, meaning
the copyright holder might be charging a $2,000 advanced fee
against 50 per cent of the publishing, but after the fact, it’s a
$10,000 non-recoupable fee against 100 per cent of the publish-
ing. So those are the ramifications those people are feeling.
VP of Nielsen Entertainment Canada
PAUL SHAVER
For the full interview, listen to the Jan. 23, 2019
episode
CM: According to Nielsen, the total
number of on-demand song streams
surpassed 59 billion in Canada last
year, which is a 47 per cent increase
over 2017, and we’ve seen that kind of
growth annually for a few years now
since streaming took off. So, how much
longer can we expect to keep seeing these huge year-over-year
increases in streaming?
Paul Shaver: I think we’ll still see some gains in the coming years,
to be candid. I think there are three things at play here – there’s that
maturity of the market, there’s the conversion of the people who are
nibbling around with it on the free side of things, and then there are
just potentially new players coming into the market with the likes
of Pandora, iHeart, and Amazon and Google/YouTube being back in
play. I think the maturity is still to come and, as a result, I think we’ll
see double-digit growth again next year.
Here’s a funny little stat from our Music 360 Canada report we did
[in 2018] … about nine per cent of the people we talked to said that
within the next six months, they’re likely to start paying for a service.
So, you extrapolate that out, that nine per cent, that means there
are 2.6 million Canadians who say they’re likely to start paying [for
music streaming]. You start amortizing out at an average of 10 bucks
a month or so, it’s a total potential annual opportunity of another
$315 million. So, I honestly feel very bullish that it’s still going to
continue to see growth and maturity in this marketplace as it grows
and I don’t think that we’ve hit the peak yet.
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18 CANADIAN MUSICIAN