Published 10/15/2015

By Jeff King

Companies, like people, build trust over years, sometimes decades. And then shockingly, often over a suspect decision, the trust is obliterated in seconds.

Let’s look at Volkswagen. Generally a solid reputation for well-engineered vehicles that had reasonable quality and competitive prices. Add in a virtual lock on the diesel market in North America. Sales were growing, with a strong core fan base and decent conquest sales.

Then September 2015 hit like a ton of bricks. Months of investigations and probes during the first half of 2015 generated little more than rumours and the occasional raised eyebrow in the technical press. Then, wham! VW acknowledged that it had built and installed software to game the emissions testing system.

The diesel world for VW in North America has now changed dramatically, and it’ll likely take decades to truly recover. The damage to the rest of the car line will not be insignificant. The trust has been challenged, eroded, weakened.

So why write about this in a blog about music and music rights? Because SOCAN has a special relationship with our members and licensees that’s built on a number of things, but most importantly trust. We’re trusted to license music uses and distribute royalties in a fair, equitable and transparent manner. We have a duty to manage the assets of the organization in a prudent manner.

These duties and obligations are taken very seriously by SOCAN. You deserve nothing less.

Published 10/8/2015

By Howard Druckman

SOCAN’s new-look Words + Music online magazine was unveiled today, propelling the publication further ahead as one of the Canadian music industry’s most important media outlets.

And we’re excited about its bolder visuals, personalized content, and potential to incorporate more video.

The slide-show photos at the top of the newly re-designed online magazine are far larger, and in far higher resolution, than we’ve ever posted before. It’s a bigger, stronger visual experience, and that approach continues as you scroll down the page to find large visual blocks automatically filling in the space, with links to the 20 most recent stories posted to the site. Those large, crisp, clean visuals continue throughout the site.

Another new improvement we’re excited about is your ability to personalize your experience of Words & Music with custom content. When you create a profile on the online magazine, you choose five or more categories of the types of stories you want to read. This prioritizes the most recent posts in the categories you’ve chosen, both on the home page of the magazine (which then becomes your unique home page) and in an optional e-mail newsletter which we’ll send you once every two weeks, or once a month (your choice).

And just as our corporate site www.socan.ca has grown to post much more video, so you can expect to see an increasing amount of video in the online Words & Music. We’re starting small, with a front-page link every Tuesday to our “SOCAN Song of the Week” video, and some videos embedded within articles, but we expect to ramp up with more SOCAN member video interviews quite quickly.

The new Words & Music is also mobile-friendly – completely optimized for all devices and mobile platforms. Now, more than ever, SOCAN’s news, views, features and profiles can reach all readers wherever they are.

As SOCAN’s Editor in Chief, I’m especially pleased and proud of the newly redesigned online magazine. I believe the content will be among the best in the Canadian music business, and the new design will provide one of the richest experiences in the industry for our readers.

SOCAN has always embraced the digital world to better reach our members, in new ways, wherever they are. Our re-design of the online magazine is just the latest self-improving step in our constant, necessary adaptation to technological change.

If you’re interested in accessing interesting, high-quality content about the increasingly exciting and successful Canadian music scene, pay us a visit here.