Music Canada CEO Patrick Rogers delivers “State of the Industry” remarks at Departure 2025

Today, Music Canada CEO Patrick Rogers shared the annual “the situation of the sector”. DepartureAnd then he watched a conscious debate about political changes affecting the global music industry.

Read all the following words below.

Good morning,

It’s great to take off here.

I would like to thank Randy Lennox, Jackie Dean and Kevin Barton for making this opening time increase for Music Canada and the annual state of the annual state. I also want to allocate a minute to congratulate Neill Dixon, the founder of CMW, to congratulate the Lifetime Achievement Award. Neill has been an important ally for Music Canada for decades and understood the importance of gathering in daylight, not only in spaces.

Every year, CMW is always a time where we can meet the most important problems of the day, not only for our members, but for the Canadian industry, and we are excited to give us the opportunity to do the same thing in the center of programming with a new vibe, a new vibe, with a new vibe.

And the industry has changed because it makes sense to make a new, renovated conference and festival. Even for an innovative industry, the industry has become fundamentally transformed in the last decade, and the acceleration of this progress seems to be accelerating.

All this are excited this week of the main labels of Me and Music Canada and Canada. We are excited about who you will hear, and we are very excited that the departure is the premiere in the country music conference.

Today, I will start saying a few words about the greatest challenges and opportunities that the global music industry and Canada have located. Suddenly, I will sit with journalist Hannah to talk about how the consequences of last week’s federal elections affect these items.

Tomorrow, we will talk about Beatdapp’s founder and partner CEO Morgan Hayduk and Ben AI’s rules and tools. We will dive into some of the biggest topics and talk about what everything means for the music industry.

And more importantly, throughout the week, members of Canada’s big labels and artists will be on the panels and at the festival throughout the city.

But I think why you take off. important For the Canadian music industry.

It is important because the world continues to rotate faster and faster and there is a lot of news. Our instincts look away it threatens to beat the instinct bend. However, the answer is to control each other. Tell us that we think it is important. And update each other about what we said before.

So let me update you with two things I mentioned last year.

I will start with what I do right.

I talked about AI last year. My journey with AI, Maybe It was a giant machine brain that really listened to music like Harrison and Hendrix and came with his own music.

Realizing the reason why productive AI models produce the rips of the world’s most famous music was that AI’s most famous music in the world.

I should have known. Because, the greatest academic and legal defenders of everything that is allowed to quit artificial intelligence are the same academic and legal advocates who claim that the Internet could have the internet, not so long ago.

Here we are a year later and… The line from AI companies is already scraped- scraped. your Music – to educate their Models – is that the copyright is old and complex and an obstacle to innovation. It is very difficult to watch from the right and it is very difficult to watch the swallowed, and even put a price on it.

I’m glad they gave up the giant machine brain items for one. I found it hard to wrest. I was worried that policy makers would look at AI companies like tomorrow – a new science and innovation, flying cars and Jetsons. And this would be seen as the cultural industries yesterday as the golden old and lighter stones.

However, under the pressure of court cases and public opinion examination, they chose to fight on the copyright. And copyright is an issue in which the music industry is particularly suitable for fighting. Because we did this. After years of difficult decisions around the flow economy, the industry is now more technologically prepared than other cultural industry in the world to deal with the licensing of the AI.

The global music industry caused by flow is innovation at the summit. We invested in people, infrastructure and technology that can distribute and licens more than 100,000 new tracks a day, and all of its rights are credit and compensated during the road.

One of the claims of AI-all things that defenders want to say is that they need text and data mining exceptions, because most of them have no value.

This argument may or may not make sense when it comes to medical data sets or traffic models – but it doesn’t make sense in music. We’ve always put a price for music, and since the beginning of iTunes and now, consumers have been paying happily for this. AI should not be different.

Do not fool. Copyright is how to pay the artists when their music is stolen. Complaining about the copyright in this business is like a student who does not want to learn writing or mathematics – and I know that these people will say that they have AIs for this – but we are all better when we understand the foundations of our world and industry.

And I’m telling you that, because artificial intelligence defenders are at the gates of our new government (as it is around the world), with the promises of investment, productivity and business if we get rid of the copyright law. We must armed the government as to why this would be a mistake and the damage it will do. Healing cancer, mapping galaxies and healing their crop yield does not require playing your music.

As I said, tomorrow, Morgan Hayduk and I will talk more about the opportunities that AI offers the industry – the tools – and the rules to make them possible. But if you can’t do this, I’ll leave you with this:

If you want to protect the creators, arts and human creative process as we know since Michaelangelo – you must fight to protect the right to copyright.

Okay, now to discuss something I did wrong last year.

If it is suitable for you, I will relax it a little and set the context. The first thing I want to report to you made me believe in politics and the government when I spent my time to work in politics. I know, because I have first experience in goodness that good policy can do. This careful idea of ​​smart people can lead to a significant change.

From the very beginning, I have once been hopeful once in a generation arrangement process that CRTC undertakes after the passage of C-11. And last year, I made a speech about how CRTC should turn every stone and that it should create a new system for the new digital global economy, and I warned that we could not organize the flow with radio rules.

… And CRTC took only 22 hours to release the 1st stage decisions, which could be called as “bringing foreign cucumbers to the Canadian broadcasting system, but which could be considered as“ regulation of flow services such as Canada Radio Stations ”.

I can’t hide my frustration on this issue. Some of the disappointment comes from understanding how we came here. I understand that the part of the industry, based on government financing, has seen that the institution has been dried for more than a decade on both film and television. Contribution to market consolidation -based financing programs ended according to lack of consolidation. The financing based on taxes on cable invoices evaporated on the cable cut. The government financing for art and culture did not meet the demand even after the ten -year traditional friendship government. And now, especially now, it is an attractive policy to sell the idea that large foreign services should pay for the Canadian content.

But let’s be clear: the best cultural policy in Canada is a policy that encourages global digital platforms to invest in Canada. Working with Canadian artists, Canadian labels and publishers and Canadian festivals, venues and celebrations.

Canadian employees, Canadian artist plans, Canadian jump pages and Canadian sponsorship.

But so far, foreign cash has gained the desire. Stage 1 of the CRTC process has not already recognized the contribution of platforms to the Canadian industry.

This is a mistake. He will invest less in Canada, and in the end, everyone will be disappointed and leave us to look for more money later.

Two weeks ago, we filed a lawsuit for intervening in the Federal Court of Appeal. Our special approach will repeat what we have said from the very beginning: the investments made by platforms in Canada must be understood and valued by the regulatory as part of the contribution system. We lead stakeholders in Parliament and CRTC. It makes sense that we only share the views of the commercial music industry with the court.

We will also contribute to official CRTC consultations to the rest of the year. Our goal continues to help CRTC to create the best regulatory frame for the flow period, so that Canadian and local artists can compete with every song recorded from all over the world.

I’m still hopeful. But hope is not a plan. We will work hard in this file. Canada deserves a global inspirational regulatory system as our artists.

I look forward to coming back next year to tell you how we did it.

Now we made a choice last week. We have a lot to talk about. I will talk to journalist Hannah Sung to do this. You first knew it as Mucmusic VJ, now he writes on culture for sales points such as The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and New York Times. The founding partner of Media Girlfriends, a company that gives priority to being included in the Canadian media. Asking me to join me, it looked a lot in the brand because it would be to leave.

Please welcome to Hannah Sung.