By Kerry Doole
As President and CEO of CMRRA from 1989 to 2013, David Basskin was at the helm of the agency for almost half of its existence. This was a turbulent and challenging era, given the radical changes in technology and in the music business, but it proved to be a highly successful period for CMRRA.
Basskin reflected upon his time at CMRRA with great affection. “I loved every minute of it,” he said. “It was a dream job for me. The fun of working at CMRRA was that I got to be involved in all the things that interested me: Law, technology, regulation, politics and music.”
Through the turbulence, the team at CMRRA, in his words, “kept our eye on the ball” in terms of the agency’s primary mandate. “We had a business that was growing like mad, but we always realised that we had clients with service-based expectations. Our clients expected us to collect their royalties quickly, accurately and inexpensively, and to be responsive if they had problems and issues.”
Our motto was, “we’re in the client service business,” and we had to win our clients’ business every day. We achieved a very high rate of affiliation – clients joined and stayed. It was cost-effective for the clients to entrust their licensing and royalty business to us and representing a growing number of rights holders gave us a stronger hand in representing their interests. It just made more sense to use our services.”
During Basskin’s tenure, CMRRA experienced major growth, both in terms of its size and operational scope, as well as the increase in revenues generated for its expanding client base. When he joined CMRRA, the organization had a staff of 8 to 10 full-time employees, and by the end of his time, that number had grown to over 100. “When I started, it was very small and quite primitive in terms of technology,” he reminisces. “Just a short time before I joined, all our information was still stored manually, using file cards. In the early 1990s, the cost of computers continued to fall and that was a big help. Automation was a key to our rapid growth.”
Basskin takes pride in the team at CMRRA, whose expertise has propelled the organization forward for decades. Many staff have been with the company for 15, 20, even 30+ years, forming a team well-equipped to handle diverse and complex challenges “It comprised people with enough expertise to handle many different and complicated areas very capably.”
Part of his leadership philosophy was to give all staff multiple tasks. “When I started, we had the copyright department who kept track of who owns what songs, the licensing department that issued licenses, and the department handling the royalties. We didn’t really have enough people as the volume of transactions was exploding, so we redesigned the workflow.
“We created teams for Sony Music, EMI, Warner, Polygram and so on, and, with cross-training, everybody could do all the jobs while developing a degree of familiarity with their counterpart record labels. We changed to meet the requirements of the business and really invigorated the place.”
“I had a great team of people at CMRRA,” he continues. “Caroline Rioux, who became my successor as President, joined not long after I did. She was incredibly smart, hardworking and dedicated, always exceeding expectations. Caroline wasn’t as focused on policy as I was, but I couldn’t match her when it came to operations, which made us a good team.”
Caroline Rioux also reflected on her 28 years at CMRRA, highlighting the perseverance and determination that defined the organization’s leadership. “CMRRA had much success over the years, but nothing ever came easy. We fought to the nines to survive and benefit our clients through an ever-evolving music industry while our clients kept us, rightfully, under their thumbs. It was a constant struggle but, crucially, our team had grit and ingenuity, and we got the job done. That’s why I loved my time at CMRRA and it’s what I remember most fondly. As long as that spirit is alive, CMRRA will continue to successfully meet the needs of rights holders, whatever challenges lay ahead.”
Basskin also gives credit to those music industry figures who served on the CMRRA Board of Directors during his time there. “Al Mair was a great touchstone and Pegi Cecconi had the best BS detector in the entire industry. Brian Chater was as involved in the political and lobbying side as I was, while Ed Glinert, a lawyer and one of my closest friends, was someone you wanted on your side in a fight.”
Basskin also singles out former CMRRA head Cyril Devereux. “He was one of the first people at CMRRA and was the General Manager for a long time. When I came on board as a lawyer from film and television [CTV], I valued his experience and wisdom about the music business so much.”
As an audiophile, a record collector and avid music lover (he had a long stint hosting “Stolen Moments” at JAZZ.FM 91), Basskin had a genuine passion for CMRRA’s core mission. “That was to make sure that the people who made the songs got paid,” he explains. “It was a challenge because a lot of these people [music users] weren’t particularly interested in paying or paying any more than they already were. Saying ‘well, we don’t do that in the States’ was just another excuse for them not to pay their fair share.
The dictum of strength in numbers also came into play, he asserts. “By putting all our different clients together, we developed much more negotiating power than individuals would have. It’s a tribute to the industry that there was enough realization that we had to stand together to get legislation changed.”
As a result, CMRRA negotiated from a position of strength directly with the record labels, advocating for higher royalty rates and seeking other better deals for its clients. “We also took action in Canada against one of the most pernicious practices of the music industry, the controlled composition clauses,” recalls Basskin.
“That was a method of contracting that artists would enter into with record companies that effectively gave the company a discount on the mechanical royalty. We negotiated and secured a voluntary agreement with the labels to limit the use of those clauses. That had the effect on a large scale of increasing the overall royalty rates.”
Another major win for CMRRA came in 1997, when its advocacy secured an important new source of revenue, the broadcast mechanical tariff, requiring commercial radio to pay royalties for the copies of songs they made on their file servers.
“That had never been done before in Canada or the U.S,” explains Basskin. “Radio stations were as dependent on the use of the reproduction right as they were on the electricity to run the transmitter. You don’t get the electricity for free, you shouldn’t get the right to use the music for free.” This tariff has since brought in more than $150 million for rights holders.
As the music industry increasingly embraced the digital age, CMRRA kept pace in 2004 by starting to negotiate directly with platforms like iTunes for their use of the reproduction right. Digital currently comprises 90 per cent of CMRRA’s revenue.
Through CSI – a CMRRA joint venture with the Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers in Canada (SODRAC), CMRRA, achieved certification of a tariff by Canada’s Copyright Board that included some of the highest royalty rates in the world for online streaming and limited download activity. That figure came in at 9.9 percent for the reproduction right and a combined all-in rate of 17.5 percent, a milestone victory at the time.
The period in which David Basskin was President saw rapid and monumental technological changes within the music industry. With that came great challenges as the agency kept pace with these changes, adapting along the way.
“When I started at CMRRA in 1989, vinyl was almost vestigial, cassettes were still important, and CDs had just started to become available. The company navigated through a rapidly changing landscape, with the rise of CDs, the decline of vinyl and cassettes, and the beginnings of the digital era.
“I’m more a policy than a transactional guy, so it was a fascinating period, dealing with the impacts of high levels of technological and regulatory change. At the same time I was also Executive Director of CMPA (Canadian Music Publishers Association), so I was dealing with policy issues largely related to intellectual property, copyright and regulation.”
Wearing these two hats (CMRRA and CMPA), Basskin was a regular presence in Ottawa, advocating for creator rights and fair payments for songwriters and publishers. “As a registered lobbyist, I was consistently involved in Ottawa, participating in various initiatives throughout the music industry to raise awareness and build support for Canadian music. There, I realized that MPs and their staff aren’t always experts on these matters. They rely on others to educate them, and that’s what we aimed to do.”
In his post-CMRRA career, David Basskin has taught Business Law and Public Policy at Metropolitan Toronto University and George Brown and Humber Colleges, run a consulting service related to law, technology and the entertainment industries, and currently works in the Superior Court of Ontario as a Registrar.
“What I miss most about CMRRA is the people, our team and the clients,” he reminisces.” It was always a treat to be involved with so many interesting people.”
“I’m thrilled to see CMRRA celebrating its 50th anniversary now. I was there for our 20th and 25th anniversaries and I know that many people would have thought reaching 50 was an impossible proposition. I wish CMRRA the very best for continued success.”
