THE ARTIST’S CHAMPION

He survived the rise of music streaming. But now AI and social media threaten the very existence of Canada’s largest music label. Here’s why CEO Jeffrey Remedios isn’t worried

Jeffrey Remedios sits cross-legged on his office’s three-seater couch, eyes smiling but cheekbones relaxed, seemingly unfazed by the musical treasures that crowd the timber shelves behind him: scattered MTV Music Awards trophies, W.A. Mozart’s New Complete Edition album, and a framed original score of “Yesterday” by The Beatles dating from 1965. The CEO and chair of Universal Music Canada may just be the most relaxed person inside the company’s ritzy new national headquarters in Toronto’s Liberty Village.

Beyond his office doorway there is creative chaos. Artists shuttle between three topquality studios; today, King Cruff, a Canadian hip-hop artist who is the grandson of Bob Marley, works on new material. Sound engineers, publicists and marketing specialists travel to and from their cubicles, scurrying through hallways lined with headshots of artists as disparate as Shawn Mendes, Jay-Z and Robbie Robertson and The Band. Setup and teardown crews come and go from The Academy, a soundproof auditorium with old Massey Hall seats tacked onto its ceiling and Gord Downie’s handwriting blown up into a pink neon wall light reading “No dress

rehearsal, this is our life.”

Pressure cooks inside the breeding ground of Canada’s finest music tracks; the fight for fan attention never stops. All the while, Remedios’ forty-something-year-old figure, hardened by a daily tennis match, betrays no outward stress outside of a handful of grey hairs amid a sea of short black curls. For him, this is a regular Monday.

“Things move so fast in music, and there is so much innovation and noise — but I take a cup half-full view of it all,” he says. “I’m in it to create opportunities for our artists, and no matter the landscape, that part never changes.”

In his 20 years at the helm of record labels, Remedios has peddled CDs and hustled to land gigs for artists when illegal file-sharing sites like Napster threatened industrial collapse. More recently, he’s witnessed streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify pour money back into the business. He is no longer frazzled by music’s quick pace of change — in fact, he thrives on a bit of frenzy. Since becoming CEO of the Canadian arm of music’s largest global rights-holder (Universal Music is valued at $47 billion U.S.), in 2015, he has fathered two children — six-year-old Silas and five-year-old Luna — with his wife, Lucia; became chair of the Toronto International Film Festival; and undertook philanthropic ventures with Toronto’s SickKids Foundation and the Toronto Public Library.

On a recent Saturday, he spoke in Hamilton at a brunch event that honoured Universal Music Canada artists; doubled back to Toronto to attend the premiere of Sylvester Stallone’s documentary, “Sly”; hosted a Disney princess-themed birthday party for his daughter the next day; and then hustled to Budweiser Stage to present a Platinum album certification plaque to folkpop artist Noah Kahan later that evening.

But now, the man leading Canada’s largest music label is facing the toughest challenge of his turbulent career — and technology is the disrupter once again. Fan attention is more fragmented than ever, social media is putting the very existence of labels in question, and emerging AI technology risks taking the spotlight from artists in ways even he cannot fully predict. Between the walls of his memento-laden office, he faces the task of meeting those industry challenges and, eventually, overcoming them.

Humble beginnings

Raised in Scarborough by Macauborn, Portuguese parents, Remedios was a music junkie in high school: a jazz fan who took to the piano and saxophone. He minored in music at McMaster University but majored in commerce, after his parents suggested it would provide a more secure career path. He was hired by Virgin Music Canada right out of school, and billy-goated his way up from an intern to director of national promotion. In 2003, during the heyday of illegal file-sharing, he left the company to create his own indie label, Arts & Crafts Productions.

“I wasn’t sure how large corporations would think about this stuff,” he says. “That compelled me to stop working for other people and launch my own music company, with the goal of working closely and holistically with artists to grow and develop their careers.”

At first, Arts & Crafts was mostly in business to promote Broken Social Scene, then just a budding indie rock band that featured Remedios’ friend Kevin Drew. As the band gained steam, winning two Juno Awards and touring across Canada and beyond, the label grew with it. Remedios travelled to the country’s largest cities spotting talent, eventually signing and representing names like Gord Downie, The Darcys and Feist, and leading the label’s artists to 21 Junos in its first 12 years of operation. Universal Music Canada took notice, and offered Remedios its top job in 2015.

By then, illegal file-sharing had largely been stamped out, but digital download services, such as iTunes, were hampering CD sales and had milked the industry of almost half its value, by making digital albums available for half the cost of physical ones. Luckily, though, Remedios’ first years at Universal coincided with the rise of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, whose ubiquity led millions of consumers paying for monthly subscriptions and pumping money back into the music industry; by 2022, its value soared past its previous peak in the late ’90s and rose to $31.2 billion (U.S.). In Canada alone, the music market is worth $608.5 million (U.S.), according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry — a number buoyed by the almost nine million Canadians who pay approximately $10 per month for streaming subscriptions.

“I came into Universal when three quarters of our revenue was through digital downloads and the iTunes Store,” says Remedios. “Now, much of it comes from streaming sites. This is good for the industry — the pie is much larger now.”

New trials

The challenges of today are much different. For one, the barrier to entry into the music space is incredibly low — 100,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day. It puts Remedios’ main gift to the test, which is, according to Music Canada’s CEO Patrick Rogers, to spot talent in niche and mainstream performers alike.

“I met him a decade ago at a music night in Ottawa, back when he was still leading Arts & Crafts,” recalls Rogers, then a political staffer. Remedios filled Rogers’ ear about the creative process and the importance of small-ticket artists. “You could tell he understood that good talent could come from anywhere — he was the most interesting guy I spoke with all night.”

But to be a talent spotter in 2023 is incredibly difficult. Instead of keeping an eye on a dozen bands, Remedios has to sift through reams of online ruffage to find his next stars — on top of the two or three demos a week gifted to him by various artists (he listens to all of them, “because you never know”). He still has the magic touch: his recent signings include recent Juno winners like Montreal duo Banx & Ranx and pop singer-songwriter Rêve, and 2023 Canadian Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Preston Pablo. There is also Ontario-born country star Josh Ross, who was nominated for six Canadian Country Music Awards this year, and who performed at the 2022 Grey Cup halftime show.

But Remedios realizes he, or Universal Music Group, are not the gatekeepers they once were. Whether or not labels are needed to make a star is up for debate. Just this August, Oliver Anthony, a country singer from Virginia, independently released “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which became a worldwide hit and reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It made Anthony the first artist to debut atop the chart without having any prior song ranked; he did it all without a label.

“We’ve mythologized the labels saying, ‘You don’t have it, kid, you gotta go,’ ” says Rogers. “But now that everyone can make music and upload it, it’s not like that anymore. The purpose of the label has evolved to elevate artists however they need: be it enhancing their social media, or using metrics to put artists in front of a target audience.” For example, Universal Music Canada flew Ottawa-based singer Jamie Fine to South Africa and organized a handful of shows after metrics revealed that her online tracks were particularly popular there.

More than that, save for abnormal cases like “Rich Men North of Richmond,” going at it without a label can make it that much harder to break through. Remedios says that a “infinitesimally small percentage” of music on Spotify and the like actually gets consumed. For that reason, a boost from a label may be more important than ever.

“I still see myself as a translator: finding talented artists in the rough and helping them become the best version of themselves,” he says. “But there is so much noise out there, so much fragmentation of attention — capturing the cultural zeitgeist is much harder, the only through-line between things that work is something real and human.”

An AI revolution?

Remedios uses the word “human” quite literally, and not as a substitute for “authentic” or “passionate.” In April, a producer named Ghostwriter released a rap song titled “Heart on my Sleeve,” which used AI to imitate the voices of Drake and The Weeknd. The track amassed nine million views on TikTok within days, before Universal Music Group — the rights-holders to the two artists — had it removed from YouTube and Spotify. Neither Drake, The Weeknd or Universal had been compensated for the track; the company considered it stealing.

The song’s virality sent the industry into momentary panic; whether or not someone can use AI to create a new song based on another artist’s existing material is still up for debate, as far as copyright law is concerned. Nonetheless, Universal Music implored streaming platforms to impose guardrails to prevent the creation of AI-driven, unlicensed content. “Which side of history do all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation?” the company wrote in a public statement.

The prospect of having AI recreate someone’s voice and use it without consequence could further complicate copyright issues that music is already having — the line between imitation and sampling was blurred even before AI entered the chat. Ed Sheeran recently used his guitar in court to defend himself against a copyright infringement lawsuit, making a point that his Grammy-winning song “Thinking Out Loud” was not a copy from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.”

Kip Pegley, an associate professor of music and drama at Queen’s University, says the industry risks falling into momentary turmoil if copyright law does not keep up with technology.

“Conversations with lawyers around this have to be happening right now, especially that people could be making money off this.”

What could become worse than sampling songs illegally, says Pegley, is generative AI eventually training itself on existing music and writing quality tracks from the ground up that yanks attention from human artists: in much the same way ChatGPT does when it writes a new screenplay in Shakespeare’s classic iambic pentameter based on a prompt alone.

Pegley senses that such a threat is still far away; large language models, after all, can only aggregate what already exists, and cannot produce new, emotional material with a human story behind it. She says the proof that music fans want to connect with the artist, and not just the track, is in the several thousands of dollars fans continue to shell out for Taylor Swift tickets.

“There is nothing like walking toward a concert; people do that because they are connecting with the musicians themselves — a computerized program will not replace that anytime soon.”

Yet, Pegley sees the rise of AI as a positive, too. Generative technology could enhance the output of musicians who are great at writing chords and melodies but not lyrics — or vice versa, or allow labels to dive into old assets and repurpose them like never before.

“John Lennon’s label could sample his voice from an old track, put it on a new recording and release it,” she says. “The possibilities are amazing. We just need regulation.”

Remedios agrees — he is more interested in the benefits that AI could bring to music than the havoc it could cause.

“Over the years, I heard a lot of fear around how DJs would kill bands, samplers would kill live music, synthesizers would kill symphonies … and none of that happened,” he says. “With ‘Heart on my Sleeve,’ we were still connecting with the artists: we were still talking about Drake, about The Weeknd. The human side of artistry is what connected us for millennia, and I don’t see that changing.”

Looking ahead

To Julie Adam, Universal Music Canada’s executive vice-president and general manager, Remedios is the perfect person to lead her team into a new wave of challenges. Adam met Remedios around the year 2000, when she was a radio producer and he was a publicist at Virgin. Twenty-two years later, Adam recalls him suggesting various artists for her radio show, sharing insightful details about each one, and why they might resonate with various audiences.

“He saw around the corner, even then,” she says, “and he pushed to have his artists heard. He is this rare, supercompetitive entrepreneurial spirit — he is obsessed with helping artists be successful — who also keeps calm under pressure and is always just hustling to get home on time for his kids.”

Not everything is the same for Remedios as he progresses through his forties. “I get up earlier now, and I might lead a more balanced life — no, I definitely lead a more balanced life.”

As far as he is concerned, as much as the title, office or technology around him can change, his job description remains the same: give artists the tools they need to perform at their best.

“You can take a question like how tech will shake up music, and drop it anytime in the last 75 years,” he says. “We are met now with the same unknown as 20 years ago — 10 years ago — throughout time, our admiration, my admiration, for artists and creatives never goes away.”

Fan attention is more fragmented than ever, social media is putting the very existence of labels in question, and emerging AI technology risks taking the spotlight from artists