Hi, everyone. Thank you very much. My name is Erin Benjamin, and I am the president and CEO of the Canadian Live Music Association.

I'll start with a bit of an introduction. Our mission is to entrench the economic, social and cultural value and power of live music, creating the conditions for concerts to thrive in every neighbourhood, town and city in Canada. We were founded in 2014. We currently represent 225—and growing—concert promoters, venues, clubs, festivals, talent agencies, ticketing companies and suppliers, businesses and organizations who facilitate access to live music for fans as well as visitors from across the country and around the world. Our members are dedicated to ensuring that the overall fan experience is the very best it can be with each and every show.

Live music is a huge part of Canada's broader music industry. It creates tens of thousands of jobs and contributes billions to GDP. It has become the primary revenue stream for performing artists. Live performance helps artists to build fans and brands domestically and internationally. Its economic footprint extends well beyond the artist, promoter and venue, and into surrounding communities. Whether it's hotels, airlines, local restaurants, taxis or corner stores, many other businesses benefit from the economics of live music, while Canadians enjoy an enhanced quality of life thanks to the injection of the cultural and social vibrancy that live music spaces, places and people provide.

This is an amazing industry. We love our fans, and every single day we work to put them in the same room with their favourite artists, but there are times when often hundreds of thousands of people want to be at the same show at the same time, as was the case with the final Tragically Hip tour, for example. When we're talking about how we love live music, we're talking about human emotion and the rabidness of fandom. Demand can far outweigh the number of seats available. Just like any other hot product on the market, the value of those tickets naturally goes up. The commodification of concert tickets is consistent with how we as a nation desire and consume popular goods. The reality, though, is that we are not all automatically entitled to attend a concert just because we love the artist. No business or industry operates that way.

I think what is most important about the resale landscape in Canada is the reality that consumers don't always know how to “buy safe” when they're looking for tickets on the resale market, in particular these high-demand shows. There is significant obscurity in what we refer to as the “grey market”. It's ostensibly set up to dupe fans—and extract as much money from them as possible—into thinking they're safe when they may not be. The days of the dubious scalper in a trench coat outside the Gardens are pretty much gone now. At least he had a face, even if we never saw it again. Now it's the anonymous guy on Kijiji who seems nice but is selling you the 100th copy of a PDF bar code to that Taylor Swift show your daughter's been waiting to go to all year, only to arrive at the venue on the day of to be told that the ticket has already been scanned in and she is the 99th person holding the same piece of worthless paper. Let me tell you, this happens all the time.

Maybe it's the website that's skinned to look exactly like your favourite venue's box office. When you click “purchase”, though, you realize that you've been charged surplus fees in a foreign currency by a company whose exact location, let alone what country they might be in, cannot be identified. Then you look at the URL and you realize that it doesn't say, for instance, “Massey Hall box office”, the way you thought it did. Instead, it says something very close to that.

Maybe it's speculative postings, where you're urged to buy a ticket that doesn't even exist yet.

It is remarkably easy to be deceived. It happens even to the people who work in the music industry. The bottom line is that these deceitful and fraudulent practices are bad for the consumer, bad for the reputation of our members and bad for artists. They are just bad for business and no one wants that.

Thankfully, our members are actively creating solutions to build consumer trust and combat things like bots and bad guys. There are four key things they're doing to keep fans safe that I would like to underscore for the committee today. These are in addition to the fact that they are investing millions to fight the bot technology that's used to circumvent systems and scoop up mass quantities of tickets. They're also migrating towards the use of digital ticketing exclusively, in order to increase security and to help us know things like who is in the building.

The four things I mentioned are using ticket authentication technology, providing money-back guarantees, displaying all-in pricing and selling in local currency via secure online platforms, and listing the pre-sale opportunities like artist fan clubs, radio and venue promotions, etc., that exist to help fans better understand what their options are. Because not all events sell out, of course, these pre-sales can help an artist extend their marketing reach.

We need to stay one step ahead of the illicit market whose sole purpose is, again, to drive prices up and divert money to deceitful companies and away from the legitimate concert industry and away from our artists. This is a huge challenge, compounded, as I say, by a lack of public awareness about how to buy safely on the Internet.

Different jurisdictions in Canada and elsewhere have attempted or are attempting to find solutions through legislation; however, the ability to enforce and the unintentional consequences certain aspects of legislation can have on the genuine industry have proven to be highly problematic. They put Canadian businesses at a disadvantage and consumers directly in harm's way.

The answer is consumer awareness on this subject, and the Canadian Live Music Association would be very interested in working with this committee to explore options that amplify the “buy safe” message to help protect fans and audiences.

There will always be times when we want to be in the same room with our favourite artists, of course, but the reality is that not all of us can be. It's human nature. It's that rabid fandom, again, to do whatever we can sometimes to make sure that we are. That can include being prepared to invest in a live music experience of a lifetime at fair market value, no matter what.

The Canadian live music industry is here to help make every single concert experience, from ticketing to attending, as safe as possible for consumers.

I'd like to thank you very much for inviting us to speak to you on this important subject today.

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