All posts by Jensen Edwards

Shifting Streams: Canadian music finds new growth online

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In two weeks, Canadian musicians will celebrate their art at the 2018 Juno Awards in Vancouver, BC. And with the falling revenues from album sales, artists may have to get together more often for concerts like the Junos to get the most out of Canadian music fans.

Though Canadians still spend the most on concert and festival tickets, they are also buying into streaming services like Spotify and Apple Play. In fact, online streaming and song downloads slashed physical album sales in half between 2011 and 2016, according to an analysis of Music Canada data tracking album and song sales.

Oddly, though overall album sales plumetted over the five-year period, vinyl sales soared. 2013 saw roughly 200,000 LPs sold. By 2016 that figure tripled to reach 664,000 units sold; 800,000 vinyl albums were sold last year. In terms of market share, one out of every one hundred albums sold in 2013 were on vinyl. In 2017, seven out of every one hundred albums sold were on vinyl.

Whatever growth LP and vinyl sales are experiencing, the turn of the decade represents an irreversible shift for modern music consumption, from in-store to online.

 

 

The major factor driving music consumption online is the streaming industry. In fact, within the “digital” category of music sales, actual song and album downloads are tumbling as listeners favour streaming services like Spotify and Apple Play.

In 2016, digital album sales in Canada fell by over 25 per cent. The drop can be traced directly to the arrival of Spotify into the Canadian market in 2014. Digital album downloads fell by 5 per cent following the Swedish company’s entrance in that year, and have become less and less popular ever since.

 

For raw data, consult this document: JEDWARDS – Music Canada Sales Data
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Visualization explation:

These visualizations are timely because the 2018 Juno awards are being held in two weeks. The event brings together many of Canada’s brightest performers for a mega-concert and awards night that celebrates the vibrancy of the Canadian music scene. However, underlying the celebration are declining album sales and overall revenues.

Visualization 1, a pie-chart/vinyl-record look-alike, vividly illustrates the shift in marketshare from physical album sales to digital sales. With that shift is a trade-off: it costs the artists and production companies less to get their music published and into the ears of fans, but they also get less money in return. A tangential story to V1 revolves around vinyl record sales, which have continued to grow steadily at a rate of an additional 200,000 units sold per year.

Visualization 2, a line graph, explicitly illustrates the drastic impact that Spotify’s arrival in Canada has had on the music landscape. Digital sales grow at nearly the exact same rate as streaming. This shows how quickly listeners have adapted to such streaming services

I consulted two main sources of public records: Music Canada’s annual sales statistics which track the music industry’s health in Canada, and the annual reports from the Nielsen Company–a consumer and industry analysis firm. Music Canada’s reports offered no units-sold totals like Nielsen does, but they do offer financial totals. Furthermore, Nielsen does not consistently track the same data every year. I therefore chose to use the Music Canada information for my visualizations and opted to punctuate what they illustrated with examples drawn from the Nielsen reports.

Cutting Down the Kaiser: How Canadian Lumberjacks Helped Win the First World War

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“”A well-made road runs through deep forest woodlands … [where] you would swear you had wandered in a day dream to a Canadian lumber camp. In fact, you have. It is a unit of the Canadian Forestry Corps at work in an English forest.” -The Observer, April 28, 1918
Image Source: The Daily Mirror, May 20, 1916
One hundred years ago, 500 Canadian lumberjacks swapped their axes for rifles. They were part of a military division originally tasked with felling and milling timber in Great Britain and France to fuel and build the First World War. They were the Canadian Forestry Corps.

BUILDING A WAR

By 1916, Great Britain was burning through its timber supply, and sourcing 70 per cent of its lumber from Canada had become unsustainable. Cargo space was nonexistent onboard transport vessels that were busy dodging German U-boat attacks on the trans-Atlantic journey. In February 1916, Great Britain demanded help from Canada, and two months later, 1,600 cross-cut-saw-wielding Canadian lumberjacks were sailing to Europe. By Armistice Day in 1918, nearly 24,000 men made up the Canadian Forestry Corps.

With trenches and tunnels drenched and rotting in the French rain, the demand for lumber seemed as perpetual as the war itself, says Maj. Michael Boire, historian at the Royal Military College of Canada. “You just don’t build something once on the Western Front, you rebuild it every other week.” 

TIMBER TO TRENCHES

When the call came from command in March 1918 for 500 additional Canadian soldiers to join the front line, 1,300 Forestry Corps men volunteered.  Meanwhile at home, Prime Minister Robert Borden struggled to muster the same enthusiasm, and had resorted to  a severely unpopular conscription law to fulfill his promises to Great Britain.

“Sure, the volunteering was oversubscribed [compared to that in Canada],” says Boire of the overwhelming response amid the Forestry Corps. “But that’s a typical reaction of the boys up front,” he explains. “They had to go home someday to answer the question, ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’” Volunteers compelled by notions of duty and honour spurred the surge in enlistments.

Tall, brawny foresters … marched into the vineyards [of France], pitched their tents on the fringe of a forest, and the next day the ring of their axes echoed among the tall pines.” – Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, Dec. 7, 1918
Image Source: Archive of Ontario, War Poster Collection
TOO MANY HEROES IN ENGLAND

Working deep in forests away from the front lines, the lumberjacks were not necessarily considered brave soldiers, says Boire. By 1918, many had resolved to prove their compatriots living and dying in trenches wrong.

Still, some saw the Forestry Corps as a means of avoiding battle. In a letter to his mother, front-line soldier John Row wrote of his uncle in the Forestry Corps: “he is a wise guy alright but it would look better if he took a spell at the front. There are too many of these heroes who stay in England.”

Meanwhile in Canada, some politicians doubted their usefulness. “It is felt the Forestry Corps staff is a refuge for personal friends of those in higher command,” argued opposition MP Rodolphe Lemieux in a parliamentary committee in April 1918.

Lemieux wasn’t alone in seeing a poorly functioning Corps. Newspapers in Great Britain reported it too. “A tremendous number of administration problems have to be worked out—from the handling of a special hospital service for the Corps to the proper handling of the discipline for the men, who are not trained soldiers, and a thousand other questions,” reads the Dec. 28, 1917, issue of The Scotsman.

FOREST FICTIONS 

Despite negative reviews, the Canadian Forestry Corps kept chopping, cutting, milling and sawing. In one day at a La Joux mill in France, workers produced enough timber to build 11 modern-day three-bedroom homes.

The Corps’ unbelievable productivity was praised by government and media alike. The same critical article from The Scotsman wrote that “[The Corps’] monthly output, if it could be published, would read like fiction,”echoing the words of the British Secretary of State for the Royal Air Force, who suggested that 170 Canadians could easily do the work of 600 Britons.

 

The First World War ended nearly 100 years ago in November 1918 and the mills in France, England and Scotland lurched to a halt. Trees regrew and forests renewed, and though saws and gears rusted in the camps, they would be raided again 20 years later by the return of war and with it, the Canadian Forestry Corps.

 

$4.6 million for paramedic service to combat oncoming ‘grey tsunami’

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In the scariest moments of their lives, Ottawans may not have to wait as long for help. To address increasing wait times for emergency aid, the Ottawa Paramedic Service will hire 14 paramedics and buy one new ambulance in 2018 with the $4.6 million increase to their annual budget. This is a 5.6 per cent increase in funds from 2017, according to the 2018 City operating budget.

Including the 2018 additions, Ottawa will have hired 50 paramedics and added six ambulances to their fleet since January 2016—a nearly 12.5 per cent increase in staff from 2015 numbers.

The 2018 budget is just the latest in a series of hikes that the city has made to try and keep up with increasing 911 calls and an aging population.

 

‘THE GREY TSUNAMI’

Darryl Wilton, president of the Ottawa Paramedics Association, thinks that the city needs to be looking to the future. “We know that our population is increasing, and we also know that our aging population is increasing. That’s what we call the ‘grey tsunami.’”

At the current rate, the city’s paramedics will have a hard time keeping up with increasing calls from the Boomer generation, Wilton says. Two thirds of 911 calls for paramedics in Ottawa currently come from people 55 or over. “The reality is that [as it stands], we can’t respond to all of their 911 calls,” said Wilton.

911 CALLS RISING STEADILY

Call volumes have been increasing substantially since 2013 but Wilton says  budget makers are looking at old numbers.

“Funding for paramedics is always between two and five years behind,” Wilton said. “The paramedics of 2018 are responding to a call volume from several years ago.”

 

WAIT TIMES MAY BE WRONG BENCHMARK

Ottawa paramedics are required to reach 75 per cent of their life-threatening calls within eight minutes. However, in 2016, an audit of the Ottawa Paramedic Service found that the service was just shy of the goal. Meaning, for more than one out of four people calling in a life-threatening situation, they had to wait more than 8 minutes for paramedic attention.

But paramedics warn against judging the efficacy of the service based only on wait times. “You have to be very careful with any benchmark,” said Deschamps. “It’s not only about that target, we’re not going to be blinded by it,” he said.

Instead, Wilton suggests looking at other benchmarks like patient outcomes, though, these figures are not currently being reliably tracked.

Wait times are of particular concern for Ottawans in more rural communities like Carp and West Carleton. In 2017, the city redeployed their ambulance fleet to be operated out of one central location: 2465 Don Reid Dr. in the Heron Gate area of Ottawa, meaning that it can take longer for ambulances to reach calls outside the Greenbelt.

Though this means that eight rural ambulance stations are now without a dedicated ambulance, Coun. Eli El-Chantiry (West Carleton-March) is not worried about service to rural wards like his. “I have been assured that this change is neither a reduction in change nor a substantive change to the current […] model,” he said in an emailed statement.

Coun. El-Chantiry points to replacement programs like the Community Paramedic Program—a roving paramedic that does preventative house calls to reduce unnecessary 911 calls—as a suitable answer to the relocation of the main fleet.

Emergency Response vehicles like this one attend 911 calls when all nearby ambulances are occupied. Photo by Michael Burns

Both Wilton and Deschamps say that it may be time to reimagine Ottawa’s paramedic service. While it is currently classified as an “emergency service,” they argue that paramedicine ought to be considered as a health care service instead. This would mean shifting more support behind services like the preventative Community Paramedic Program, in an effort to cut unnecessary 911 calls.

“We don’t view ourselves as a response agency anymore. If we were, there is no way we could keep up: we would be chasing our own tail,” said Wilton.