Canadian Firm Mediazoic Plans to Outsing iTunes

By Greg Nisbet

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you love music, either playing it or hearing it. Imagine for a moment you’re a struggling musician. How would you feel if you wrote a really great song, practiced it with the band, laboured over perfecting the arrangement, and then, on the day you were going to play it live to an audience of your biggest fans, you heard almost the exact same song on the radio, by one of the biggest acts in the world?

Something like this recently happened to me.

Tomorrow, iTunes will likely announce during its big event that it has added social features to its service that will allow a much broader music sharing experience for us music lovers.  In the interest of a provocative headline that would fit well into a tweet and a Facebook status update, I suggest that given the right backing, I can outsing the iTunes strategy.  They are first out out the gate but then they had access to an awesome array of resources to develop the concept faster. I spent three years on a shoestring budget conceiving and then developing something only to have my thunder stolen by these big boys.

When I heard the first murmurs  of Apple’s plan to add social features to users’  iTunes library, I was crestfallen–but, having now had some time to reflect, I’ve come to see it for something else. I can’t go into too much detail at this stage but I can say that Canadian-based Mediazoic, my company, has plans to launch a similar music sharing service, the difference with the Mediazoic model is that it doesn’t depend on a particular platform or service.  The Mediazoic model  is more versatile as a result of having an open-platform approach. It doesn’t tie music lovers to any one site, service or brand.  Because of this, we think we have an advantage over the iTunes service.  By being the front-runner, iTunes can sell the concept of shared music to the music establishment. We plan to follow suit sometime later this year.

Before I go any further, I want you to know that there are no sour grapes here. Yes, it’s true that we’d have probably beaten Apple by a year had we been headquartered in Silicon Valley, but, thanks to lots of help and a team of people passionate about music and technology, we won’t be throwing ourselves on our swords any time soon. That’s because we didn’t actually stop thinking ahead when we started to build.

This is a lesson learned from Apple themselves, and the truism that allows them now to command so much control of the music business, the mobile business, and, if my own experiences with my beloved Mac are anything to go by, the future of the computer business as well. But for every Mediazoic, I can’t count how many Canadian innovators I’ve seen whose great ideas have been sacrificed upon the pyre of Canada’s frustrating funding culture. I’m not saying great entrepreneurs are hard to find up here, but I’m willing to go on the record saying that great innovators are few and far between.

We are great artistic innovators, producing a share of great musicians and actors disproportionate to our population, but we fall somewhat short as innovators in the media space within which those artists can thrive. It’s probably the reason our banks don’t fail, but it’s also the reason why, with the exception of RIM, which does business like an American company anyway, we don’t have any giants built on innovation. Having been intimately involved in the running of businesses on both sides of the border, one stab I’d take at why this is the case is that Canadian businesses tend to be run internally by collaboration rather than competition. We are about business by committee, rather than by instinct, idea, or vision. It’s not that great ideas aren’t born here – it’s just that, by the time they go through the risk-extraction process and are ready to bear fruit, they are no longer new.

A friend of mine who works in the music industry over in Europe, having an inside knowledge of the Mediazoic product, and knowing that we were talking so some pretty high-level people in the music business, pointed out something I hadn’t even considered.

“You have a great Canadian story shaping up there.” he said. “Sweden has Spotify, the UK has last.fm, and the US has Pandora…Mediazoic is going to be an important part of a great Canadian music tech story!”

I was happy to take his prediction as prophecy, except for one thing. When I hit the road looking for money, for every hopeful cultural patriot I came across, I heard at least five smart money people, several of whom thought I might even have the keys to digital music paradise, tell me to abandon the Canadian hinterland and go south where the real action is.

These people miss the point: The digital universe is a land of opportunity unlike any we have ever known. It has none of the traditional borders and none of the traditional barriers that have vexed Canadian companies in the past.  We have the talent, the connectivity, and the creativity to be innovators and leaders in this space.  The great divide has been crushed in the digital universe, and Canadian innovators can compete more easily today on the global stage than ever before. Canadian acts have long known that global audiences represent a lush fruit as reward for their labour. It’s time for our entrepreneurs to follow in their footsteps.

Greg Nisbet joins FYI Music as our digital music correspondent. Greg is a storyteller, music lover, and entrepreneur who has worked in jobs as varied as busker, actor, safari guide, private school principal, and mergers and acquisitions broker. He is the founder of an Internet media start-up called Mediazoic. He speaks five languages besides English at varying degrees of fluency, most well enough to carry on a conversation but none well enough to convince any of his three kids to perform household chores.