Things They Should Invent: subsidize use of Cancon in TV/movie soundtracks

Most of the rules to promote Canadian music and other performing arts industries fall in the category of requiring people to use Canadian content, e.g. a certain percentage of songs played on the radio must be Canadian. I think a more effective approach would be to make it a good business decision to use Canadian music.

One way people often discover new music is when it's used in the soundtrack to a TV show or movie. I've read that TV and movie productions have to pay a considerable amount of money for the rights to any songs they want to use.

So to promote Canadian music, they should set up a fund to subsidize the rights to Canadian music for soundtrack purposes. The artist still gets paid whatever they'd get paid, but there's little to no cost to the production. The subsidy could go to international productions as well as Canadian productions, to give our artists broader exposure. So you want to use the Hip in your guerrilla indie film, you can have a subsidy. You want to use Caribou in a Hollywood blockbuster, you can have a subsidy.

To promote emerging artists (and, ultimately, to save money), the subsidies would be bigger the less often a particular artist has been used. For example, the first person to use a particular artist gets a 100% subsidy, the second gets a 90% subsidy, the third gets 80%, etc. until the artist has been in 10 movies/TV shows and you have to pay full price. This would also mean that other people are doing the work of finding interesting emerging artists to subsidize.

The process would be very simple. A producer would fill out a form saying "I would like to use this song by this artist", and simply get a message back saying "This song is eligible for a X% subsidy. Do you want to use it? (y/n)". If it isn't eligible for a subsidy, it will cost no more than it normally would anyway.

So Canadian artists get money and exposure, producers get less costly music rights, and the program is very easy to administer because grants are awarded first-come first-served and other people are doing the work of seeking out worthy emerging artists.