Wondering how to make it as a musician in Canada? Do it yourself | Canada Voices

For her 24th birthday, Destiny Johnson threw an all-ages hardcore punk show. One Saturday in August, around 100 people piled into Montreal’s underground venue La Sotterenea to watch four bands. The energy was frenzied and kinetic. Teenage punks two-stepped and flung themselves around the mosh pit while the scrappy independent musicians raced through short, blistering sets.

Johnson started organizing shows earlier this year through a project she called Be About It. Initially, that was just going to be the name of a zine rooted in her music community, but eventually she started using the title to book and promote shows, release tape cassettes of music by hardcore bands and help artists book their own tours.

Be About It’s priorities might seem anachronistic. Johnson, who lives in Montreal, focuses on physical media, small music acts and inclusive, self-directed environments rather than financial return, streaming numbers or playlist additions. But the way she operates might also be the reason she’s happier than a lot of music-industry workers.

“In the past, I felt like I’m expected to sell the products of my hobby for it to be legit. But this is really about community, and I don’t care about making a dollar off of it.”

Johnson’s not alone in her thinking. Over the past decade, the popular-music industry has succeeded in selling artists the idea that unless they’re on a major label and earning a full-time income from their work, they’re not really artists at all. Faced with this pressure, musicians and industry workers across Canada say that a renewed focus on community-based, DIY models can help artists – strained by the demands of the modern music landscape – rebuild healthier, happier relationships to their craft.

Gil Carroll and Adam Soloway, who play music in the band Living Hour and book shows in Winnipeg through their promotion company Real Love Winnipeg, say that DIY gigs offer a more involved and like-minded music community than larger platforms. And although no musicians get rich off the underground circuit, the profit margins are sometimes more favourable.

“You do the show as cheaply as possible so the bands actually have an opportunity to make some money,” Carroll says. “If you’re playing at a bigger venue, there’s lots of built-in expenses and costs, and the artist is always the last to get paid in that scenario.”

Musician Klarka Weinwurm, who lives in Sackville, N.B., says the “give and take” of small live shows is the greatest feeling of success she’s found, and a salve for the increasingly isolated and digitally mediated nature of music work. “You have all these numbers on a streaming site, but you don’t get that actual connection with people,” she says. “I want to see the faces of the people that are listening.”

DIY traditions are especially strong in punk and electronic music, but they’re not the only communities that support independent operations. Ben Vallee, a 25-year-old bluegrass musician from Montreal, recently booked his own cross-country tour, including dates in Newfoundland and British Columbia, without any label support. Vallee works as a pastry chef while he’s not on tour, and while he’d like to earn enough money to support himself through his creative work alone, it’s not an at-all-costs goal; his values matter, too.

“It’s invaluable to be able to make a living without stepping on your principles,” Vallee says. (Johnson echoes this sentiment: “One thing about being DIY is you don’t have to worry about your higher-ups telling you what you can and can’t support.”)

Independent music scenes have produced some of the most influential music of the past 60 years – grunge, punk, electronic and hip-hop, to name a few. But since the 1970s, music labels have consolidated music-making into an increasingly “corporate mindset,” says Brian Fauteux, associate professor of popular music and media studies at University of Alberta.

Streaming services, corporate monopolies and algorithms have shrunk the digital creative commons predicted in the early days of the internet. The Taylor Swifts of the world are doing fine under this new system, Fauteux says, but the same can’t be said of “a smaller band that might be trying to break into the music world when these are the sort of trends they’re up against.”

The effects of this new music landscape are growing more visible. A report from the Canadian performance-rights group SOCAN found that in 2021, Canadian artists made less than $70 on average from streaming platforms. In 2022, the Canadian rapper Rollie Pemberton, who performs under the name Cadence Weapon, drew attention to the fact that he and many other Canadian artists were no longer able to break even on tours, and that, as a result, live independent music was in jeopardy. Compounding matters, Spotify announced last year that it would no longer pay artists for songs that have less than 1,000 streams.

Fauteux, who co-authored a 2022 report on how this new era is affecting independent Canadian musicians, adds that an emphasis on compulsory social-media presence in the name of reaching as many ears as possible has encouraged artists to “break down the barrier” between their public and private lives and commit huge chunks of time to various content-creation strategies, often without clear benefits to doing so. This chafes with DIY culture’s facilitation of genuine connections through shared artistic, social or political values.

Parker Thiessen is another musician who doesn’t abide by the industry playbook. He has been playing experimental music for nearly 20 years in Edmonton, a practice that led him to start an independent record label, Pseudo Laboratories, nearly a decade ago to release experimental works by other artists as well. He doesn’t make profits on the endeavour, but it doesn’t put him out, either.

Doing things this way, Thiessen says, brings a form of instant gratification that slogging against streaming-service algorithms and vying for a lucky break on social media can’t. “It’s outside of this idea that you need to pay thousands of dollars to record and press on vinyl and it has to have months of marketing lined up,” he says of making an album. “It’s kind of erasing that whole concept of the industry.”

But perhaps the most important part of DIY is that the Y doesn’t refer to just one person. Thiessen says it’s about sharing of resources: Maybe someone has a home studio that their friends can use, or a generator gets shared between acts putting on a show. “In the true sense, do-it-yourself is not necessarily doing it alone,” he says.

In Montreal, Johnson says the DIY scene is growing – almost certainly a result of artists and their supporters across the city demonstrating that profits aren’t the only reward for making art.

“Music is just a form of self-expression. You don’t need a big backer to do that,” Johnson says. “Your friends in your community will support you if you put that love in the community yourself. It’s kind of like, build it and they will come.”

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