The FYI News Bulletin: July 29, 2021

By David Farrell

Music shop czar Doug Putman (HMV UK, Sunrise Records Canada and FYE US) tells Audio Media Int. that he’s debt free in the UK, looking for a new Oxford St. flagship location, and that he remains bullish about the CD. HMV is marking its 100th year and part of the celebrations include an in-store concert by Ed Sheeran at HMV Empire in Coventry on August 25.

– Bruce Cockburn’s 50^th anniversary tour as a professional musician was put in the deep freeze last year, but returns without skipping a beat this Dec. with the start of a 29-show theatre tour in N/A with Canada dates in Peterborough, Kitchener, Toronto (Massey Hall) and Ottawa (NAT) on April 19, 21, 22, and 23 respectively.

– Deadmau5 is stirring again. Having sold US$240K in an NFT art sale earlier in the month, he’s now crowdsourcing his next music video through a video game platform and plugging a refreshed edition of When the Summer Dies, now a hammer-heavy groove-grinder that first enjoined him with Lights in 2014.

– Music’s one-percenters took a haircut in the revenue department last year because of tour cancellations. Billboard Boxscore data posted a tenfold decline from US$779 million in 2019 to $79 million and accounted for just 20% of artists’ collective 2020 take-home pay in the US. In previous years, it has made up 75% to 80% of the top 40 Money Makers’ income. You can read the particulars here.

– Song submissions invariably come with explanatory notes, many of them with personal narratives attached to them. Anjulie is no different, even if her message is more extreme.

Describing the catalyst for her latest song, Big Bad World, she writes: “Navel-gazing narcissism is rewarded in this constantly connected, depersonalized, and performative (sic) world. It's about turning a blind eye to the horrors of humanity like ecological collapse, terrorism, school shootings, and crippling economic inequality while being distracted by shiny new tech, social media and the incessant gamification of social status.”

– The CMRRA has published a 4-step registration process for collecting digital mechanical royalties in Canada for copyrights streamed on TikTok. Details here.

– The Midland Cultural Centre (MCC in Georgian Bay, has named Daniel Broome as its new Executive Director, effective August 15th. Broome’s CV includes senior positions at True North Records, the Toronto Musicians’ Assoc., and Harris Institute.

– Alberta Health has reported 71 people likely acquired the covid virus at the Calgary Stampede. A total of 528,998 people attended the July 9-17 events.

– Influencer Marketing Hub has drilled down on TikTok data to provide a massive doc offering stats about the social media platform. The sum total tells us that the app has become a marketers dream vessel for reaching people with no life, but a couple of notable points included tell us that TikTok users spend more than 14 hours per month on the app, 600M of the 2.6B users are in China, and 89% of its app revenue comes from the Middle Kingdom.