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Music

Building The Brand: An Interview with 4479 Toronto's Amy Terrill

What is 4479 Toronto? We found out from one of the Vice President's of the movement.

Last month I outlined 4479 Toronto’s campaign to bolster the city’s music industry by focusing on music tourism. That outline also included some criticisms of the campaign thus far, which 4479 felt were unjust. Since I didn’t approach them for comment in the original piece, opting instead to highlight my concerns as well as those of individuals situated near the front lines of Toronto’s music scene, I thought an interview would be a good opportunity for 4479 Toronto to clear the air.

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I met with Music Canada’s VP of Public Affairs, Amy Terrill, a strong advocate of the potential for growth in Toronto’s music industry and someone who has been involved with 4479 Toronto since day one. She outlined some of the struggles 4479 Toronto are currently facing with their messaging, though finds the amount of organizing they’ve accomplished in the music industry thus far as a strong sign of things to come for the advocacy group’s future.

Noisey: When would say the idea for 4479 started? Was it when the “Accelerating Toronto's Music Industry Growth” study was commissioned?
Amy Terrill: No it goes a bit further back than that, sometime soon after I started at Music Canada. [4479] was really one of the reasons I decided to join the team here. This organization had been focused on federal issues up until that point pretty exclusively. Once we had some of our issues with regard to copyright protection looked at the federal level, we took a step back to think-- ok we’ve been consumed by this project for some time now, what have we been missing? How else can we rebuild the marketplace for music? So we started with an economic impact study to better understand the sound recording industry-- where it’s impacting across the country. In that study there was a snapshot of live music, and it showed that live employs twice as many people as the recording side. We found over eighty percent of the sound recording activity is in Ontario, and almost all of that is in Toronto. We knew that it was concentrated here, but the degree of concentration was a surprise. So we thought, the provincial and municipal governments would get the most out of this information. Here is an asset they have, which they probably don’t even know about, and one that we didn't even know the extent of. In terms of live, we can only speak anecdotally, but certainly from our live music partners and stakeholders we can estimate around fifty percent of live music activity [in the country] is here in Ontario. So we decided that best practice, we should look to a municipality in the music industry that we know does a lot of things right, and that was Austin, Texas. So we commissioned the Austin report.

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From that report, a number of things were identified: one was around the Advisory Council, that has since come to fruition, and some of the other findings reinforced what we already knew: Toronto has this amazing music scene, but there’s very little recognition of that scene at the decision-making level. It’s not being well promoted, and there’s not one Toronto brand to speak of. I don't think they called it this in the actual study, but it’s basically “brand: bland” made up of a lot of things, but nothing specifically. That fact in itself led to the branding exercise.

What do you think about the general scepticism surrounding this project because it’s being led by Music Canada, the lobbyist group for major record labels?
So yes, we are the association of record labels. They pay our bills and we are very fortunate that they fund this activity as well, because it doesn’t directly benefit them. But they believe as we do, that we need to find ways to improve the environment for music, and improve the opportunity for artists to record, sell their work, and perform-- which is where they’re getting a lot of their revenue right now. We’re one organization, we needed to make sure we could show to municipalities, and provinces that we speak as a broader community. Recording studios work with us, come to meetings with us. Festivals. Live music venues. Award shows. We have strategic partnerships with the Polaris Music Prize and the Junos. We try to bring artists, musicians, agents with us wherever we go. We’ve self organized in this music community, which had never been done before. It had been very siloed. That’s something that’s been mentioned numerous times that people appreciate about what we’re doing.

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Not laying any blame here, but the Economic Development Committee at City Hall had actually a notion several years ago to do something around music. They even hired a young person and sent them to Austin for a summer to study the music scene there. That’s going back --- 7 or 8 years ago. They themselves saw that Austin was doing something right and they wanted to do something about it here, but they didn’t know anything about the music community, they didn’t know who to reach out to. There was no cohesive community that was collaborating.

So I guess it was fairly easy for you then to recruit people to support this idea, people like Mike Tanner of NXNE or Jesse Kumagai of Massey Hall (now of Live Nation). How did City Councillor Josh Colle get involved?
He was on the Economic Development Committee back when we had our first presentation. We didn't have the full Austin report yet, but we had quite a bit that Titan Music Group sent us in advance. Just to back up a bit, even before that, we had met with several city councillors and officials, like Michael Thompson, who is the chair of the Economic Development Committee. We knew that it’d be important to get in to see him. He said he wanted us to present to the Economic Development Committee. We were actually there to comment on a motion that had been brought forward by Mike Layton to come up with a music strategy, and actually, his motion had made mention of Austin as well. It’s not just us who’ve noticed Austin. Mike Layton’s motion suggested that the city should do a study and we were able to say that we’ve already started one, here are some of the findings, and we’re happy to work with you to share what we produce. We may not come up with all the answers, but it’ll be a good place to start. So the committee at that time endorsed our work and instructed the director of the committee to work with us so that we could come back and make recommendations. So that was February 2012. Josh Colle was a member of the Economic Development Committee at that time and was very vocal and supportive in that meeting and we’ve never really looked back since.

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Had you personally, or professionally via your work at Music Canada, been to Austin before it was identified as the city you wanted to model Toronto after?
I personally have been to Austin many times. [Music Canada] has had a presence there for many years. And if you look at SXSW in particular, a lot of Canadians go there. There’s a big Canadian presence. A lot of business gets done at SXSW. So we’ve certainly participated on that level. We’ve had a few opportunities to go to Austin to meet with city officials, industry leaders, and meet with the Chamber of Commerce many of times. We went there to get a better understanding of how they support their music industry, how they deal with issues that will arise like around noise bylaws or permitting or things like that, as well as how they use music as an asset. So in Austin, every city official will tell you that because of music, they have a tech sector. The Chamber of Commerce, which is like our Invest Toronto, uses music in every pitch. So every time they’re trying to lure a new business to Austin they use music. Their music scene creates a place which attracts young, talented people. It’s a creative, fun, vibrant city. So that benefits a tech company, that’s in a global competition for talent. They see the value of Austin.

The tourism Visitors and Convention Bureau, so our equivalent of Tourism Toronto, use music to bring conventions to Austin. They will take musicians with them when they’re pitching a convention, and they go further by saying that not only your delegates at your convention have the ability to experience authentic Austin music after convention hours, but we will program some local music to be played for you at your convention as well. They’re just so smart in how they use music-- they’ve really figured it out, and a lot of other cities are paying attention.

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You mentioned that ‘authentic’ Austin music would be performed for the likes of the many convention-goers who roll through the city. Do you know how Austin goes about figuring out what ‘authentic’ Austin music is? I think that was one of the concerns I see coming up again and again with regard to what 4479 Toronto are proposing for a Toronto brand, and how that brand will be decided.
I can’t really speak to how they classify authentic Austin music. This is our full brand strategy (image). People may look at our 4479 Toronto website, and there is a video there that is very pop-rock oriented-- that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to recognize other expressions of music, that’s how the whole thing is built: “4479 Toronto, music meets world.” It’s in our brand character. It’s not about one sound, it’s about all sounds. That is the unique nature, we feel, of Toronto as a music city. There are quite a few cities that could claim to be music cities: Nashville, New Orleans, Austin, Melbourne, Berlin. In most cases, they have a pretty dominant genre.

Yeah. It’s almost like a caricature. I haven’t been to Austin myself, but I’ve been to New Orleans. When you go there, you get the sense that the jazz music you’re hearing in the French Quarter is being performed for tourists who arrive with some sort of expectation of how New Orleans music should sound. Meanwhile, the actual local musicians loathe it. That’s where I think a lot of the concern is as far as how Toronto’s music will be branded, you know, whether or not it’s going to be an actual, accurate representation. But you’re saying that the city’s diversity is incorporated into 4479 Toronto’s branding strategy…
Absolutely. Diversity is the basis for the brand, actually. So 4479 obviously is the longitude and latitude of the city. The idea there being that Toronto is where all points meet, there are some great visual pieces there you know, like a crossroads, you think about travel, a destination. Touring artists should be making Toronto a destination. You have an audience from around the world that should be making Toronto a destination. Only Toronto connects you to a world of music, because we represent every possible genre. So that is the basis of the brand. it’s going to take time for us to express all of that, but of all potential criticisms, that one has no basis whatsoever.

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Is there anything else from last month’s article that you’d like to specifically address? We’ve already gone over a few of the concerns I outlined in that initial article like representing Toronto’s diversity, as well as the branding strategy itself, but is there anything else?
Well I think one thing in there about the diversity, you talked about the makeup of the Music Advisory Council itself, which was actually formed by the city. It was our recommendation that there be a Music Advisory Council, and through a number of series of meetings including Economic Development Committee and moving on to the City Council itself, the idea was passed unanimously by Council and then it was up to city staff and Council to determine the terms of reference for the committee. They set up a process and opened it up to applications. They had over two hundred fifty people apply to be on the committee itself. They then went through a series of interviews-- I’m not sure about the exact number -- but they interviewed a cross section of people, and from there they chose somewhere around thirty five people to sit on the Music Advisory Council. Thirty five people who they thought would best represent the music community. I’m sure they had all kinds of criteria that they were trying to meet, i.e. representation from promoters, representatives of different genres, cultures and ethnicities, everything-- as cities and bureaucracies do, they have a million checkboxes, but it was their decision. It wasn’t 4479’s decision at all.

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So you just advocated for it and they carried it through.
Yes, we were fortunate to get Council’s support and then it was up to the office of Economic Development to implement Council’s decision.

It was unclear how much influence 4479 has had on Council while putting this together. You advocated for the Music Advisory Council’s existence, but it was unclear as to whether you would have a say in how the end result would look.
Yes that was one thing we wanted to address. I think there was also some suspicion around the Association for the Major Record Labels leading the charge, and I hope that you understand that it was long overdue: that someone actually gathered the music community together, and identified this as an opportunity. We keep hearing from people, you know “I can’t believe that it took us this long to put something like this together.” Part of the reason was, the music community had been divided. It’s made up of a lot of entrepreneurs. It’s a lot of small business owners who are focused on their business first. If they’re operating a venue they’re focused on making that fly. There really was no one gathering those voices around a common idea. We’ve felt that a lot of people are very happy that we’ve taken this initiative because you know, no one had done it. This same type of campaign could’ve happened fifteen, twenty years ago. We here in Toronto have had an incredible history, and have been known as an amazing music city going back to the sixties. So I don’t think people should be suspicious, I think people should say: “hey, thanks for stepping up!” By no means have we talked to everybody yet, but slowly we’re trying to build. The word is getting out. Lula Lounge is really excited about what we’re doing. Wavelength is really excited. Do416 as well. We’d love to do more, and we will over time, but it’s just a matter of gathering other supporters. It’s growing, it’s a very organic kind of build.

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I didn’t intend on the original piece to sound suspicious, I wanted to lay out what I saw about the project that was working and what wasn’t. I kept meeting other people in the artistic community who either had never heard about it, or who were very skeptical about your ability to enact any kind of positive change and so I thought those voices should be heard. Either way, based on what you’re telling me, it sounds like it boils down to the fact that you haven’t communicated every aspect of your brand strategy to the public.
To be honest what we really need is someone who can be here and focus on 4479 one hundred percent of the time to talk to all the venues, and get out there to talk to the artists and musicians. It takes a bit of time. I wish that every one of the thousands of people who work in the industry all knew about it. Right away. But they don’t yet. We have to keep slowly building. We do have materials out there, Tourism Toronto just put us in one of their magazines, Massey Hall just had a feature on us in one of their recent programs. We’re doing some stuff with [North By North East] again this year, and Canadian Music Week. Slowly we’ll get it out there a little bit more, because the way we see it is, we want more people to get involved and that’s how it becomes even more powerful. In Austin, their brand is “Live Music Capitol of the World” and it gets millions of impressions because all the festivals talk it up and say “we are in the live music capitol of the world.” The city doesn’t pay for that, and that’s where the power of this really begins to take off.

Is there anything that a regular, music-loving Torontonian can do to get more involved with your cause?
Well if they sign up for the newsletter on the website, they can find a bit more of the things that we’re doing. If they care about music, for whatever reason, and any kind of music, make sure that they tell their city councillor that. Music happens everywhere in the city, it’s not just a downtown phenomenon. There are artists everywhere, there are recording studios everywhere. So they need to make sure their councillors care.

Michael Rancic is a freelance writer in Toronto. He's on Twitter.

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Toronto seems like a hard place to have a festival. They just banned electronic music.

Before that, another festival had to relocate suddenly.

Some festivals are doing great though!