Well, it’s that time of the year again: SOCAN time. What does that mean? Proximately, it means I’m listening to “Lies” by Stan Rogers on CFUV’s netcast, a song so crammed full of sappy condensed-milk sentimentality that only the megalithic authenticness of Stan can get away with it. Ultimately, it means this is the week that SOCAN conducts it’s survey of what the noncommercial radio stations are playing in order to determine how to distribute the revenues SOCAN has been collecting from said stations. DJs traditionally work up “Canadian-only” sets for the yearly surveying to ensure as much of that cash as possible finds it’s way to the hands of Canadian artists. It also happens to be Valentine’s day today, hence “Lies”.

At least I think that’s the way it works. A cursory googling has neither confirmed nor denied that hypothesis.

SOCAN, by the way, stands for “Society of Composers, Authors, & Music Publishers of Canada”. Maybe they need to conduct a survey of their acronym. They’re a member-run industry group roughly analogous to the devil, but less so.

So there’s lots of Canadian music on the campus stations today. They’ll dig up some non-standard stuff to fill the set lists, and that’s usually a good thing. DJs are often at their best when they have a specific challenge at hand. So far today my favourite was a lament on the personal politics of love called “we’re all here” by someone called Becephalus (?).

SOCAN doesn’t just take royalties from noncommercial radio, they also take fees from commercial radio, TV, bar owners and anyone else who “publicly performs” music.

I wonder if SOCAN day (weekend? week?) always falls on Valentine’s day. If so, I guess it would make good solid business sense for Canadian musicians to write love songs. I guess it does in any case.

As much as I’m suspicious of music industry rights groups, the SOCAN model does seem to hold a lot of hope as a jumping off point for switching from a pay-the-middleman-per-unit model of music distribution to a compulsory (or non-compulsory) licensing model. In fact, they seem awfully close to it already.

Without SOCAN, you, the music user, would have to get permission from every composer, songwriter, lyricist and music publisher for every piece of music you perform, or authorize for performance, in public. Think how time-consuming and expensive that would be.

Yes, well, exactly. Find and replace “perform or authorize for performance in public” with “listen to” and they’ve got something there.

I wonder if I could buy one of their “customer” public performance licenses like a bar or an elevator operator and play all the music I want? Would I be legally obligated to purchase the music I “publicly performed” then? Would anybody care?

Don’t know. In the meantime I will be enjoying the flood of northern love and anti-love songs.