Describe your background and industry experience, and explain how it will help you contribute to the SOCAN Board of Directors?
As co-founder of the duo Alfa Rococo, I was responsible for the creation and production of the group’s five albums and hundreds of live performances. Alfa Rococo won two Félix Awards in 2008 and has received more than a dozen additional nominations since then. The group has also received several SOCAN Awards for the many singles that reached No. 1 on the charts. Over a career spanning more than 20 years, I have taken part in numerous musical projects and performed at many festivals in Québec and abroad. Alongside my artistic activities, I have long taken an interest in the mechanisms through which creators are remunerated in the new digital music economy. This led me to found the RAM (Regroupement des artisans de la musique) in the fall of 2016, to allow music industry professionals to speak with a unified voice and help define a more equitable economic model for artists. In addition to serving a term as a director on SOCAN’s most recent Board of Directors, I also sit on the boards of SPACQ-AE and the Union des artistes (UDA). Through these experiences, I believe I have acquired extensive knowledge that enables me to serve as an effective director, well informed about what is happening in our industry and on the ground, and able to bring an informed perspective to SOCAN’s royalty management and distribution mechanisms.
In your opinion, what issues will be most important to SOCAN members over the next three years?
It is clear that music generated by artificial intelligence is an issue that SOCAN must address to ensure that rights holders whose works have been used to train these systems—often without consent or compensation—are recognized, protected, and fairly remunerated. SOCAN has already begun reflecting on this issue, but a clear, agile, and proactive framework will need to be put in place to effectively defend the value of human creation.
From a royalties perspective, the recent implementation of a new system and a new portal represents a major step forward. We must ensure that they enable distributions that are more accurate, more transparent, and faster. Adopting a monthly distribution frequency and reducing the time between performance and payment would be concrete improvements to enhance creators’ quality of life and financial stability.
As a francophone director from Québec, I am committed to preserving and enhancing the place that our language and culture deserve on the Board of Directors and at SOCAN in general.
On a broader policy level, I would like to contribute to developing solutions to address the underrepresentation of local music on streaming platforms. This aspect of the digital music ecosystem is essential if creators are to once again be properly remunerated for the dissemination of their works.