While the Department of Canadian Heritage must propose a new version of the C-10 project by February to regulate the activities of streaming platforms, the music industry is rising to the front. Its representatives want the federal government to force them to recommend local and francophone content.
“The figures we have are catastrophic. The music of local artists is struggling to reach its audience because we are not taken into account in the platform’s recommendation mechanisms. That’s what is at stake, ”says Jérôme Payette, Director General of the Association of Music Publishing Professionals (APEM), which represents 830 publishing houses with 400,000 French and Quebec musical works across the country.
He recalls a statistic recently unveiled by ADISQ: only 7% of all the songs listened to continuously in the province are from Quebec. “And this 7% includes artists like Ariane Moffatt as well as Alexandra Stréliski, Céline Dion or Arcade Fire. We don’t have the details related to the language, ”says Mr. Payette.
He hopes that the next iteration of the bill will include social media, and talks about the fact that YouTube accounts for nearly 50% of listeners in Canada. The case of the popular platform clearly shows the importance of recommendations in the navigation of Internet users. About 80% of the videos that are viewed are said to be related to recommendations.
However, 64% of recommendations on YouTube go to videos with more than a million plays against 5% to those with less than 50,000 plays, according to a study by Pew Research. A situation that puts local content at a disadvantage, which is moreover not English-speaking, Judge Jérôme Payette.
“And if for a variety of reasons, we do not find ourselves in these recommendations, the artists do not exist. It creates a domino effect that affects the invitations to go to TV shows and the sale of tickets to shows, ”he says.
The government should extend to these platforms the law that has governed broadcasting for decades, according to him. “On the radio, there are quotas of 65% for francophone music and quotas of 35% for Canadian music,” he said.
Human decisions and algorithms
How do these recommendation mechanisms work? “In fact, there is a cocktail of means that are used by the platforms to issue recommendations. Means which are different from one company to another, depending on their business model, and also which evolve over time ”, explains Christian Roy, digital consultant at A10s who carried out a study on the subject last year. .
Some platforms favor editorial recommendations, that is, those which are the result of human decisions: “The part of human decision in what QUB music offers, for example, is important. “
Others rely on algorithms to establish their preferences from their browsing. “YouTube is certainly the most glaring example. As a social media, it broadcasts several types of content. He could hardly do an editorial, ”he said.
However, in recent years, hybrid recommendation mechanisms have gained in popularity. These mix algorithms and editorial decisions. “We call them algotorials. These are recipes that are specific to each platform. In some sections of Apple Music and Spotify, we can guess that there are this type of mechanisms that rely on both listening history and human decisions. “
In addition, in some cases, sponsored content. “Spotify is gradually introducing this approach where rights holders agree to receive less royalties – which are already low – in exchange for a greater presence in certain lists. “
The idea would not be to constrain the platforms from a technological standpoint by imposing an approach, but to ensure a presence of Canadian and Quebec pieces to users, he said, specifying that it would be up to them to adapt their mechanisms.
This presence could pass through thresholds related to the number of impressions of pieces from here, or the number of times they would be seen. “When it comes to converting the impression to clicks and plays, there wouldn’t be much control over that,” he says.
The issue is notable with the transformation in the way of consuming music on the Internet. Year after year, the sales of CDs and digital albums are declining while listening to streaming music, on the other hand, is growing exponentially.
Across Canada, there were 88 billion plays in 2020, 16% more than in 2019 and 1,360% more than in 2015, according to figures from Nielsen Music. With 1,786 million listenings, pieces by Quebec performers represent around 2% of all listenings in the country.