An Untold Chapter in Canadian Music Business History

Few know the inside story about what happened to The Record, Canada’s 20 year-long weekly music industry ‘bible’ and so I’ve decided to dish the dirt and come clean about a sad chapter in Canada’s music industry history.

The Record started off on a wing and prayer from a hamlet in Ontario called Horning’s Mills with an initial capitalization of $50,000: $25,000 put up by David and Patricia Farrell, and $25,000 in promissory notes from A&M, Capitol, CBS, MCA and Polydor. The two nay-sayers when we started were WEA and Sam the Record Man. Ken Middleton at WEA and Sam Sniderman both were content with RPM magazine and didn’t see the necessity of another trade publication. As an aside, Bob Sniderman took out his own subscription which, I believe, was $65 in the first year.

The ‘trade’ was typed up using a second-hand IBM Selectric, printed in black & white on legal 81/2″ x 14″ paper and hand stapled on the top left corner. The first edition came off the press in the spring of 1981, the exact same day Canada Post went out on strike and stayed out for six weeks. I remember the panic Patricia and I felt when we realized our ‘baby’ was in danger of being still-born. As is often the case, adversity can bring its own reward. Brainstorming, I called Joe Summers and Gerry Lacoursiere at A&M and asked if they would be willing to distribute the new trade publication through the branch offices using the regional radio promotion and sales teams. They agreed, and suggested I call the other major labels to see if they would be willing to do likewise. The up-shot was that for six weeks The Record was delivered to radio stations and record retailers by A&M, Capitol, CBS, London, MCA and RCA.

For six weeks The Record was the only game in the country with radio and retail sales reports as Radio & Records, Billboard, Gavin and other US trade publications were delayed at the border with the postal shutdown. It was a perfect launch with a captive audience.

Over time The Record created a set of charts that tabulated the different genres of music on radio and separate charts tabulating the best selling singles and albums. The chart development was done in consultation with the record companies. The initial blueprint was created with the help of Bill Ott, Doug Chappell, JP Guilbert, Randy Lennox, Lesley Soldat, Larry Green, Bob Ansell, Peter Diemer, Kim Zayac, Art Graham, the late Bob Muir, Graham Powers, Lee Silversides, Larry McRae, Don Oats and others. Over time the independents had a voice, including Kevin Shea and Linda Dawe.

All of the above, and perhaps several others, were immensely helpful. It was a cumbersome group to get consensus from, but in numbers favourite radio stations and retail accounts were overshadowed, and having the participation of  the trade lent credence to the charts. The end results may not have been as detailed and accurate as those produced today by SoundScan and BDS, but they offered transparency and the mathematical equation that was used to compile them wasn’t that much different from that employed by Billboard at the time. The manpower to collate and crunch the huge amount of data was largely done by Ann Laviola and Paul Tuch who religiously made sure the reports were collected and often times had to patiently prod tardy reporters and pacify over-zealous record promoters.

Initially the reports were filed either by hand with me calling out across the country, later installing a Telex machine that clattered away in a front room in the manse in Horning’s Mills, then I shifted the operation part-time to my longstanding co-conspirator Richard Flohil’s office on Bay, increasing the overhead with a one room office on Davenport that had a purple shag carpet, brown cork board on the walls and a sink at one end of the room by the doorway.

Over time the operation grew to include layout artist George Finch, Paul Tuch and Ann Laviola, my sister Mary Ann Farrell, Pat McSweeney with my (now ex) wife Patricia handling the business and attendant details that I was never good at.  Somehow I always managed to be blessed with a dedicated team and I think for the most part I treated them with the same honesty and respect as they showed me. There were others who worked at The Record for a time but those named were at the core of the operation.

The publication grew to become a four-colour,  magazine-sized weekly that averaged 36 pages of news, reviews and charts. Editorial content and reviews were filed weekly by Jeff Bateman in Vancouver, Brendan Kelly in Montreal, Daniel Caudeiron with Larry LeBlanc and Reviews editor Richard Flohil in Toronto with Kevin Wynne rounding out the team as news editor.  And then there was  a movable masthead of stringers and occasionals as budgets allowed that included Nick Krewen, Ritchie Yorke, Martin Melhuish, Gary O’Brien and Karen Bliss.

But I digress: As the chart data becoming increasingly more complex to crunch, slice and dice,  it became apparent that computer software needed to be written in order to manage the volume and to produce timely reports. I had written for Billboard magazine for several years as the nominal Canadian editor and had befriended the trade magazine’s chart editor Tom Noonan.

I ran into the late, great Tommy Noonan at a trade convention in San Francisco and mentioned the problem I was having managing the volume of chart data and he suggested I connect with Marty Feely in New York who was in charge of Billboard’s computer data division. Patricia and I flew in and met with Feely who was gracious and sympathetic to our dilemma. The upshot was The Record was able to licence Billboard’s chart system, meaning we could input the data online 24/7 and produce a vast number of reports. Better still, the data was available, for a fee, to anyone who subscribed to the new online service. Billboard took a cut and we were able to profit handsomely from the deal, as well as offering chart services that complemented Billboard’s own chart data that spanned the US.

The relationship with Billboard and Marty Feely in particular was excellent but I was ever aware that the ownership of the publication was forever changing hands. At some point in the last decade of the last millennium Feely was able to licence and deploy software that had been developed by the US military. It was the beginnings of the BDS system that scanned radio frequencies for matching data contained in an enormous computer storage system pre-loaded with a seemingly infinite universe of recorded music. It looked as if BDS would deploy in Canada with The Record as a partner, then VNU, a Dutch company purchased Billboard Publications and the deal fell apart. As I was quietly told at the time, ‘Americans like co-ventures, Europeans, in particular the Dutch, like 100% control.’

It was now BDS versus The Record and the major players in the Canadian market were divided on the benefits of the new system that initially planned to roll out with a very small sample of stations and a very high price to access the data.

Around the same time Mike Shalett and Mike Fine did an end run round Billboard, securing exclusive sales data from the Handleman Co. and several major US retailers, seriously jeopardising the integrity of Billboard’s retail charts. It was an untenable situation for Billboard, which Mike and Mike used to their advantage, eventually cutting a very rich deal for themselves with VNU.

My own reaction to all of this was dam the torpedoes: The Record put up $50,000 to finance software that could match data collected by BDS, and create a comparable SoundScan data collection system that could interface with  major music retailers and rack-jobbers that had computerized inventory systems. Leonard Kennedy was the head of what was then the Retail Music Association of Canada and he was tremendously helpful and supportive, but he also had a very strong rapport with Mike Shalet at SoundScan who was a salesman like no other I have met.

The chips were down and the record industry was divided over whether to support the interlopers or The Record. It was a time when the record industry had just been through a cannibalistic orgy, swallowing up the independents at first and then feeding on each other. A&M became part of PolyGram and PolyGram then became part of Vivendi with Universal and on and on. With the concentration of power came massive debt loads from the spending sprees and suddenly the profitable backwater of Canada became part of North American operations as the majors looked to ‘rationalize’ operations and minimize costs. The widespread autonomy of the presidents at the major labels in Canada became less so, and with New York, Paris, London and LA calling the shots, these companies were interested in compliance and sameness. The big boys wanted BDS and SoundScan in Canada and that was that.

Slowly but surely the majors and the CRIA wore me down, pushing me to licence chart data from the two American entities. Advertising revenues were drying up and I capitulated.

The sad fact is that in doing so, the Canadian music industry and the many musicians and acts that had come to rely on chart data from The Record were shut out. The SoundScan and BDS systems were hugely costly to support and, necessarily, very expensive to access. And because the BDS samples were small, a lot of smaller market stations weren’t included and that had a negative impact on Canadian acts building a story in the secondary and tertiary markets because they just didn’t show in the reports.

Almost overnight the ability to track the best sellers and easily access the year-end lists became prohibitive. More important in my view, the data was moved offshore. Canada’s charts were no longer sovereign. Over time, Statistics Canada stopped tracking the shipments and regional sales, and the CRIA now rarely up-dates the gold, platinum and diamond sellers.  Curiously, as we shifted in to the ‘information’ age, less information was available to the trade. If one didn’t have deep pockets one was kept ignorant of the facts.

It was a sad time at The Record and the decline in revenues and increase in overhead eventually killed the publication. Donald Tarlton (aka DKD) thought he could do better and started his own trade publication, but it didn’t last. The advertising dollars just weren’t there to support a publication, and the fees to licence the charts were steep.

In a way I view that ending as the end of a chapter for the Canadian record business. The Record didn’t cave in easily but Goliath stomped on David. At the end, in the spring of 2001, 20 years later, the publication shut down. It was down to a staff of two: editor Steve McLean and myself.

Along the way I had made decisions that perhaps can be faulted, but the fight to save the publication and the charts was fought with every weapon in the arsenal. Martin Melhuish and Lee Silversides both took the reigns over from me for a year separately as I tried to regroup, replenish my stretched inner resources that were fried from also mounting the annual Canadian Music Week convention, Awards program and the festival, along with an annual directory, and petition the music industry to stand firm.

I left my office for the last time with great sadness, but was overwhelmed by the responses from readers who emailed me for weeks to come. In total there were over 200 emails from broadcasters in small communities, and big guys like Chuck McCoy and Gary Slaight that phoned to lend support and express their own feelings. It was the end of an era and a story that has been in my head to write some day. Oddly, along the way Mike Shalett and I became friends of a sort. I suppose it was that we had mutual respect for each other, even as warring warriors. At the end, Mike took me aside one afternoon over lunch and told me the battle was done and lost. His advise to me was to go home, go through my Rolodex and chuck most of the names away. ‘There are only a few true friends,’ he said. I thought long and hard about that comment. He wasn’t being unkind. It was sage advise, but advise that, rightly or wrongly, I paid no heed to.

I think it time to share some of the many stories that have happened to me over the years: stories that are sometimes comical, sometimes sad, often times illuminating and, hopefully, always of interest to you, the reader. Like so many in the field, I lost my job, and for a time my way. My identity was lost and I had to reinvent myself. Part of what nourished me was the many great friendships I made over the years, and the kindnesses that were bestowed on me.

Cheers to one and all:
David Farrell