website updates

We are making some website updates over the few days to our main site www.bcacms.bc.ca . Hopefully everything will be up and running again smoothly before the New Year.

Inside the Music Business

This month's BC Business Magazine features an interview with music business insiders Sam Feldman, Bruce Allen, and Terry McBride about the current shape of the recording industry in Canada. The article by Chris Cannon asks some tough questions about the music and recording industry in Canada and abroad, the nature of the industry today and the effects of new media and technology upon the development of bands and new artists.

Our music choices today are much more varied and diverse than say twenty or thirty years ago, Terry McBride points out that the development of the CD itself forced the industry to release 60 min. recordings instead of the old 35 - 40 min formats from LP's, which in some ways had an effect of lowering the quality by giving the consumer more product than they wanted. CD's while possibly having a better sound created higher prices for the same product. Also the new format created the notion of "pull" rather than "push" . With CD's you could choose to listen to track 3 over and over again, and only listen to track 3, something that is much more awkward to do with a turntable or cassette. Old technology used the "push" marketing strategies where the big corporations would decide what would be produced and what would receive air play. The mass market mediums are no longer Radio and TV, but video games and the internet, which has changed everything.

The new world is now based on "pull" where the new millennial generation pulls content from the internet or from online stores, rather than being "pushed" upon us by the mass market mainly through radio.

Spin City - Article in BC Business Magazine - December 1st, 2008

Merry Christmas

Here is a video to cheer you as we head into the Christmas Season.
Happy Holidays to everyone.



The 12 Days of Christmas - Straight No Chaser. Enjoy!!!

Canadian Music Centre provides new online access

It was announced this past week by the Canadian Music Centre that the Ann Southam Audio archive will now be available online for users to listen to sound files from the Canadian Music Centre holdings in streaming audio.

From the press release on their website , the new service "Designed to provide music enthusiasts across Canada (and abroad) with online streaming access to a catalog of over 8,000 contemporary classical works by Canadian composers, CentreStreams once again positions the CMC as a leader among international music information centres."

Information about the new service can be found on the CMC website at www.musiccenter.ca

Another reason to turn off the video games and practice...

Ok, we know our kids spend too much time in front of TV , video games and other media devices. We have suspected for awhile that this probably isn't that great for us. Now there are some rather disturbing results that have come forward this week about a correlation between media use and the overall health of children and teens. A recent article in the New York Times from December 1st explores recent research findings released by Common Sense media and the National Institue of Health (USA).
From the New York Times "A review of 173 studies about the effects of media consumption on children asserts that a strong correlation exists between greater exposure and adverse health outcomes." (Hey maybe I should spend less time working on this blog! I should go practice!)

New York times article link

Also here is a link to the executive summary of the report found on the Common Sense media website.

Executive summary - Media + Child and Adolescent Health: A Systematic Review