The Canadian Press reports on the thriving Canadian indie music scene. Echoing a recent NY Times article, the report notes that indie labels do a better job of using the Internet and that they take risks that the major labels shy away from. Jeffrey Remedios, the co-founder of Arts & Crafts, one of the top Canadian indie labels, is quoted as saying that "It's an amazing time to be in a Canadian band. It's a really vibrant time."
Of course, you don' t hear that from Graham Henderson and CRIA. Perhaps that is because the four major foreign owned labels that run CRIA (its board of directors is comprised of Henderson and representatives from Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI) are responsible for only eleven percent of new Canadian releases each year. Moreover, while those labels have dropped the number of new Canadian releases over the past few years, the Canadian indie labels have continued to release hundreds of new Canadian titles with the total number virtually unchanged since 1998.