Canadian Arts Funding and Indie vs. Independent Labels

Posted by Patrick Boyle in Srsly, You Guys

Following my twitters yesterday, Paul from Endangered Ape tipped me off to the fact that The Daily Swarm ran an interesting letter from Greg Ipp at Unfamiliar Records. If you check out their roster, they do have a handful of extremely talented bands (Snailhouse, No Gold) and they also have Japandroids, who I think are a whole lot of flash in an oh-so-tiny pan.

Anyways, the letter suggests that funding agencies like FACTOR (run by the Canadian Government) and VideoFACT (run by MushMusic et al.) dole out far too much cash to bands that are already quite well established, and in many cases overrated, such as Metric and MSTRKRFT.

I don't agree completely with everything the guy says, but it makes for an interesting read and the comments are (shock) about 20% coherent and non-internet-like. I added my two cents to the thread (#10) but you might be more interested in posts by Nick Diamonds of Islands/Human Highway/Unicorns/etc. (#7) or, apparently, someone from the band Wheatus (#14) (!!!!!!!)

Without a doubt, the most interesting part of the whole discussion was actually inspecting the recipient lists for FACTOR and VideoFACT money. My observation, if you don't care to track down my comment, is that FACTOR actually does a pretty damn good job of spreading out the dollars between "already-haves" like Metric and "super-obscures" like, I dunno, Slim Twig.

Anyways, this whole post was just a lead-up to this:


more in Music Features     |     posted Jul 14th, 2009 at 3:55pm     


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