This week we spotlight The Yonge Street Mission at Yonge/College providing hot meals and nutritious snacks daily to youth at the Evergreen Centre and to all ages at the Christian Community Centre. The food bank welcomes adults and families and offers clothing through a voucher system at their Double Take store. Donations are always in need and can be made online. Food services are available from 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday to Friday.

Please donate to your local food bank. The need is real.

In keeping with the seasonal vibe, here’s the final solo album from Gord Downie, Away Is Mine. Steered to life by “my oldest Toronto friend,” guitarist and co-writer Josh Finlayson, Downie recorded the ten songs of Away Is Mine in July 2017 at The Tragically Hip’s studio in Bath, Ontario, mere months before he died on October 17th that year.

Since I hold a couple of gateways in various areas, I receive a lot of requests on social media. Most people are,of course, people I never have met in real life. There are fake accounts so the first thing you research is to find out if the person is actually real. If we have friends in common it is a sign that the person is real, not just one common friend but a couple.

Now these common friends also give away a hint of what level you are on in the industry. Almost like a fortune teller, I can read what you want and what will happen with your friend’s request. I have been playing with my staff here in the office to see if my theory is right and so far, I have been better than the fortune teller machine Zoltar in the movie “Big”.

One example is when an unknown artist is making a friend’s request. You can see that they are new to the industry, there are few friends and the ones they have are the usual local heroes in the area they are from. I usually say yes, and my guess is that that in the first 48 hours I will get a message with a question about sending a song for me to listen to.

This week we highlight The Caribbeaan Canadian Catholic Centre at 867 College Street. It’s a member of Daily Bread Food Bank and operates a soup kitchen on Wednesdays from 9 a.m. until noon and also arranges for emergency food when necessary.

Please support your local food banks. The need is very real and getting realer with every lost job.

Three time JUNO Award nominees and Billboard charting Sultans of String are serving up their first ever Live Stream concert in their brand new studio decked out with a fun, interactive set-up for the audience. Fans from across Canada, the USA, and the UK can come together for a special live concert experience.

 “Our plans is to Zoom the show, which is a super fun way to create a community experience among our fans, since we’ll all be able to see each other” says bandleader and Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal recipient, Chris McKhool.

A Facebook friend of mine asked this question: Artists, if you had an opportunity to sit down with an industry executive what is the one question you would ask?

It is kind of interesting what the artist would answer. My guess is, of course, they will be aggressive and start accusing this person because they haven’t succeeded yet. Like that would be this person’s fault? Okay, in the old industry there was gatekeepers. That is long gone, everything is really open. The fact is that nowadays it’s not hard to sit down and discuss with even the biggest industry executive what the goals are and how to achieve them.

At 10,000 streams across platforms, Karizma and Alessandro Montelli continue to amplify messages of equality, justice and humanity in their new collaborative track, “1 Race” — available now!

“This is a song that represents the change we want to see in the world right now,” they say. “It’s inspired by everything that’s been going on in our world with police brutality, racism, and injustices.

Karizma feat. Alessandro Montelli - 1 Race (Official Music Video) here:

“It also looks at the tough times, especially recently, and is wishing for everyone to stay safe and keep social distancing for a better world to minimize the spread of COVID-19.”

Stepping in this week with ‘Hallucinate’ from Dua Lipa.

Highlighting The Sharing Place, 624 Annette Street. This non-profit compassion organization provides warm meals on a weekly basis as well as a food and clothing bank for all people regardless of faith, income, or culture. Donations of non-perishable food items or funds are always needed.

"Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust…"

Yes, you can hear me humming that Queen song when I bump into artists or industry professionals that play the headless chicken game. This phrase was invented by an intern many years ago around the behavior of a couple of artists that had screwed him over.

“They just run around like a headless chicken screwing everyone or screwing each other!” he screamed in frustration. And the whole office just laughed out loud. We all knew what he meant; we all knew the behavior he was trying to describe. After that, it became known as “the headless chicken game.”

So, what it is when a person just runs around and tries to use everyone they meet as a steppingstone? At the same time, they try to be friends with everyone. They don’t understand that connections in this business are all about trust, networking, loyalty and friendships. So if they try to climb the ladder on several different places, the end result will be that everything crashes down around them.

Indie Week (Canada) and Cashbox Radio has assembled a diverse panel from Sweden, Spain, Colombia and Canada with backgrounds in online radio, magazine, network TV, and artist management for an Indie Week Panel on September 15^th at 1 PM EST.

Four Industry Professionals will be discussing the new importance and value of online radio and media exposure on a global level. The moderator is Darryl Hurs, Founder/Owner of Indie Week/ Director of Market Development Canada at CD Baby.

Panelists:

Sandy Graham
Cashbox Radio: Program Director/On-Air Host
Cashbox Magazine: CEO/Editor-in-Chief

This week we highlight Eastview Neighbourhood Community Centre at 86 Blake Street, a member of the Daily Bread Food Bank that has been operating for over 40 years. Monetary donations can be made online, while members of the community are also encouraged to reach out to find out how to run a successful food drive in schools or workplaces. Open Tuesday and Thursday from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m

Back in June, The Dead Centuries released their catchy sun-baked vibed song “Pop a Soda”, and drunk on carbonated joy, their second summer single “Crystal Summer” is ready for ears August 28.

Many artists follow all the rules and advice that are given to them at conferences, online or in workshops, etc. One rule seems though seems hard for them to understand: format.

Format is how the general audience listens and how music presented to them. You have every artistic right and freedom to not follow these format rules. You need to be aware that you are excluding yourself from a lot of listeners. No, you cannot change people. Either you change for them or you accept a smaller range of audiences. Either way is the right way for you, it's your choice. Right now, however, we have too many people that have chosen to leave formats and then doing PR and efforts that are in a format world, and then complaining that they don’t get the same chance as other artists and that the world is too shallow.

This week highlighting the Flemingdon Community Food Bank 10 Gateway Blvd Toronto.
Hours Mon-Fri-10 am-1.30 pm. 416) 422-4322

Stepping out with a new single from the always adventurous and highly accomplished Lori Cullen. Born in the crucible of fear and confusion that is CoVid 19, Cullen channelled her own dire misgiving into a heart rending take on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’. Yeah, we’ve heard it covered in all sorts of ways but you ain’t never heard it done like this. So let’s hear from the lady herself.

June 2020

I don’t feel well.
Everything has changed too fast.
All of my paid work is gone.
I have to teach my child and I am failing.
I have no more time to myself.
I’m worried about money.
I’m worried about everything and everybody.
Grocery shopping feels like going to battle.
I have to do something to remind me of who I am, to give me hope and to pull myself out of the mud.

It seems like we need to know what value things have nowadays. Salt had huge value in the middle ages. Today you can buy salt fairly cheap. Things that used to have value might lose it now in our current times.

That is how to look at recordings. Just thirty years ago recording was an expensive endeavour. You needed quite a large financial investment to do a record that required a lot of money. And then you also thought twice about what to record and chose your songs carefully.

Today, I can just go down to the local electronic store, buy a kind of cheap microphone (or take the microphone that is built in a laptop) and just record a song. And then just put it on any social media channel in seconds, and even get it out on Spotify within 24 hours.

The problem here is that many think that the value of that recording is the same as the recordings of The Beatles on Abbey Road.  It’s not. Technology has provided us to have better equipment to record than The Beatles had ever dreamt about when they recorded Abbey Road. With that though came the idea is that everyone thinks they can write a song like “Yesterday”.

Without Salome Bey and Howard Matthews, there would be no Diana Krall, no Drake and the music theatre scenes would be very different.

Salome Bey, a true American original, jumpstarted Black Culture in Canada with her partner in life, Howard Matthews.  Until Salome's and Howard are passing, the Bey-Matthews family was the first family of the arts in Canada. Their restaurant “The Underground Railroad” was the unofficial Black Cultural Embassy of Canada.

Salome Bey’s spiritual approach towards the arts, music, culture, theatre revealed an authenticity seldom displayed today, with a profound love and respect for the music and its composers.

If you had ever seen Salome on a theatrical or concert stage, she shared that love with the audience and instilled that love for authenticity into her students and young performers she taught.

We all know that we are consuming too much for the planet. A third of all food we produce is thrown away as waste. That is 50,000kg or 11,0231lb a second thrown away as waste in the world and as Greta Thunberg has pointed out it’s not sustainable.

In an interview not long ago Marcus Ek from Spotify told artists that they need to release more content when he was questioned about Spotify and how they paid out so little to artists.

I just feel that we are doing the same stupid mistakes in the music business as we do in our food consumption. The new streaming economy is just one click and then forget it.

Same as the food; we produce a mountain of apples so you can have just one. And we produce a mountain of songs for you to listen to just one. Of course, this will affect the quality. To be able to produce a mountain you need start by giving fertilizer to the project, and you want everything to grow faster. Yes, you will get a decent product but it is not that perfect product that you had before.