Now that the dissertation is officially submitted (yay, you can check it out here), it's transition time. I'm slowly moving on to other projects. In academic terms, I'm starting a postdoctoral fellowship. Except, since I'm not exactly sure where things are going or how long it will be before I find more permanent work, I really just feel post-. Hence the new blog title and the site redesign.
My post-doc is with Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. The plan is to research Business Method Patents, a special class of patents that allow companies to assert ownership over technologies and the ways in which those technologies are put to use. Relatively rare before the 1990s, this class of patents flourished during the high tech boom at the end of the millennium. Ostensibly designed to foster and protect innovation, business method patents act as a kind of quiet quest for control over information and cultural practices. They are prime examples of how certain actors use moments of technological change to secure economic and cultural advantages through law and regulation. Seeing as I'm working with Michael, I'll also likely be doing some research on copyright and digital music, in particular what the proposed copyright bill (Bill C-32) means for the Canadian music industry.
All the talk in the Canadian music industry today, though, revolved around the Polaris Music Prize which was handed out last night in Toronto. The award went to the immensely talented Montreal band Karkwa for their brilliant album Les Chemins de Verre. There's lots of next day commentary, with reactions mixed on the winner and on the overall usefulness of the award. That's par for the course for the award though; it is inherently polarizing.
As part of the wider jury that helped get the long list together, I've always been more interested in the process of Polaris than in the actual result. One of its stated goals is to get people talking about Canadian music and every year it succeeds in spades. Another, less talked about aspect of Polaris, is to convert all that talk about Canadian music into actual sales. Founded by an ex-record exec and managed by a board that includes lots of big and small label people, Polaris is a new way to sell Canadian music. The sales pitch is never overt, which is why it works so well, but every year its interesting to keep an eye on the sales bumps that artists get from being named long lister, short lister or winner.
Alexandra Moloktow has a piece about Polaris in the Walrus that's worth a read, if you can disregard her misplaced aesthetic attacks (wow...and I thought I didn't like last year's winners). She starts to scratch at the tension between art and commerce and between mainstream and indie that exists in Polaris (and, I'd argue in the Canadian music industry more generally). The landscape is so fuzzy now that traditional lines of division or ways of understanding taste are becoming less and less relevant, or at least certain. I'm not sure why Moloktow feels this is a swindle...it's just the result of a complicated and converged media landscape and an industry that's undergoing constant re-organization.
Polaris aims to pick the best Canadian album regardless of genre, label affiliation, sales numbers, etc. It's a subjective call as to whether or not it succeeds. What it does do without question is start people talking about Canadian music and shedding light on a huge amount of talented (and sometimes unrecognized) artists.
As I was writing, this just came in. It's the process not the prize
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