Describe your background and industry experience, and explain how it will help you contribute to the SOCAN Board of Directors?
Bob D’Eith is a Canadian music industry professional with extensive experience as a songwriter, musician, entertainment lawyer, and advocate for artists.
As a musician and songwriter, D’Eith was a member of the JUNO Award nominated band Rymes with Orange and is celebrating 25 years with the JUNO Award nominated electro-acoustic duo Mythos. Mythos spent years on the Billboard Charts and recently hit 80M catalogue streams. His experience as an artist has given him firsthand insight into the challenges artists face.
Beyond his work as an artist, D’Eith has been instrumental in supporting Canadian musicians through his legal expertise and industry leadership. As a senior entertainment lawyer, he has worked with countless artists, helping them navigate contracts, intellectual property rights, and the business side of music.
His influence extends to the administrative side of the industry. D’Eith served as the ED of Music BC for 14 years. Under his leadership, Music BC played a vital role in funding local artists and helping them expand into international markets. Bob served on the boards of CIMA (exec), WCMA (chair), FACTOR NAB (chair) and CARAS rep for BC. Bob co-created the $5.2M PEAK Performance Project and was the Chair of the Host Committee for the 2009 JUNO Awards.
D’Eith is also an author, having written the best-selling A Career in Music: The Other 12 Step Program, a guide for independent musicians on succeeding in the industry.
In addition to his music industry work, D’Eith served as a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in British Columbia (2017-2024), where he has continued to advocate for the arts and culture sector as Parliamentary Secretary for Arts and Film.
With over 35 years in the music industry, he has played a key role in supporting Canadian artists and shaping the music business landscape in British Columbia.
In your opinion, what issues will be most important to SOCAN members over the next three years?
Songwriters have faced incredible challenges over the past decade with massive shifts in the music industry. Dramatic reductions in physical mechanical royalties, lower payouts for streaming royalties, downward pressure on public performance royalty rates. Add to that the impacts of the COVID epidemic on live performance revenues, songwriters were hit very hard.
Moving forward, the challenges continue with the impacts of Artificial Intelligence, fair royalty rates for streaming, a massively oversaturated market (100M songs on Spotify), changing audience tastes, declining traditional synchronization offers, and general fatigue and burnout amongst songwriters.
While AI does provide many tools for songwriters, the threats are alarming. AI is already being used to compose film scores, generate lyrics and melodies, and write entire songs. The use of existing songs to train AI algorithms and other ethical issues dealing with the scraping of the internet for existing copyrights to develop new AI models is a huge problem.
SOCAN has an important role over the coming years to fight hard for songwriters and publishers to protect the copyrights in works, fight for fair compensation for songwriters through the streaming of music and making sure that the Canadian government establishes guardrails for the operation of AI in Canada.