Canadian Music Industry Pushes Ottawa to Act on Artist Rights

Canada’s music industry has been through too many revolutions to count. Every few years, a new invention shows up promising to change everything forever. The radio was supposed to kill the concert hall. The cassette was supposed to kill vinyl. The internet was supposed to kill both. Then came streaming, which promised fairness and freedom, and delivered another layer of corporate control wrapped in convenience. So when artificial intelligence started learning how to sing, remix, and produce songs out of thin air, the people who actually make the music saw it for what it was. Another gold rush built on their work, and this time, they decided to walk straight into Parliament before history repeated itself.

This week in Ottawa, record labels, songwriters, and publishers filled the committee rooms with a rare sense of unity. They spoke not like panicked artists, but like people who have seen this cycle before. The message was blunt. The system is broken, and the law is too old to handle what is coming. Music is being used to train and fuel technologies that did not exist when the Copyright Act was written. Companies are building tools and products on the backs of artists who have no idea their work is part of the equation. The people behind the songs are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for something far less romantic, a legal framework that recognizes that art still belongs to the person who made it.

The conversation has been growing louder for months. Musicians are discovering that recordings of their work are being pulled into datasets used to teach AI systems how to compose. The problem is not that the technology exists, it is that there is no permission involved, no transparency, no compensation. When a song is played on the radio, everyone gets paid. When it streams, there are at least mechanisms in place to track and distribute revenue. But when an AI model learns from that same song, the money vanishes into the cloud. The music industry is not demanding the impossible. It just wants the same rules to apply to new tools.

The executives and advocates who showed up in Ottawa spoke about the need for clear legislation. They want AI companies to disclose the material they use. They want licensing structures that let musicians opt in or out of data training. They want to update copyright laws so that creative work is not treated like public domain the moment it hits the internet. The proposal is not about punishing innovation. It is about keeping it honest. No one in that room was arguing against progress. They were arguing for the right to participate in it. Canada’s government has already hinted at an interest in revisiting copyright, but like everything else in policy, it moves at the pace of paperwork. The industry is trying to create momentum before the issue slips into the same bureaucratic limbo that streaming rights did. Artists still remember how long it took to get proper streaming royalties, and how small those payouts turned out to be. The fear is not that technology will make musicians obsolete. It is that it will keep doing what it always has, using their work to build something new and forgetting to send the check.

Beyond the hearings, there is something cultural at stake. Canada has spent decades building a reputation as a country that punches far above its weight in music. From the indie bars of Montreal to the pop factories of Toronto, its sound has always had a sense of honesty to it. There is something stubbornly human about the Canadian approach to music. That makes this fight personal. When the art starts being mined by machines, stripped of authorship, and turned into endless content, it hits a nerve. These are people who have spent their lives trying to prove that art is work, not magic.

The future everyone is trying to imagine does not have to be a nightmare. It could be collaborative. AI could become another instrument in the studio instead of a thief outside the window. But that only happens if there are rules. The hearings in Parliament are not about drawing battle lines between artists and engineers. They are about setting terms for a relationship that already exists. The people in the industry know that the technology cannot be stopped. They just want to make sure that when it learns, it remembers where it came from.

In the end, this is not a story about robots stealing jobs or musicians clinging to the past. It is about ownership and respect. Every sample, every riff, every recorded breath has value, and that value should not disappear into code. The people who came to Ottawa this week were not pleading for help. They were reminding the country that behind every sound that fills a bar, a phone, or a set of headphones, there is a worker who deserves to be credited and paid. That is not nostalgia. That is just fairness, and it might be the only thing standing between art and the algorithm that wants to replace it.