Canadian Live Music Association CEO Erin Benjamin Gives 10-Year Overview And a Key Finding From Economic Study

As we enter 2025, the Canadian Live Music Association has just ended its first decade and will soon release the findings of Canada’s first-ever Economic Impact Assessment. 

In this wide-ranging interview with Pollstar, CLMA president and CEO Erin Benjamin, who is based in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, reveals some of the key findings, including the impressive gross domestic product (GDP) figure (over CAD$10 billion), as well as the difficulty in galvanizing an industry that she says was “not a community of joiners.” She then had to represent that industry, as a “united voice” and “[tell] our story to government and about our economic, social, and cultural power.”

Benjamin is known as a motivational tour de force and smiling ball of fire, armed with praise for her members and statistics for the government.  A one-time artist, she helmed the Canadian Arts Presenting Association for more than seven years before coming to the Canadian Live Music Association, originally as executive director. 

Prior to CAPACOA, she spent seven years running the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals (now Folk Music Ontario). 

The CLMA launched in November 2014, as Music Canada Live, with less than 20 members, with the mission of entrenching live music’s economic, cultural, and social value and to create the conditions for concerts to thrive.

It underwent the name change in January 2019.   They now have just under 400 members.

Pollstar: Why did the live sector feel it needed an association a decade ago?
I didn’t start this. I was hired by a founding board whose idea it was. The catalyst was an emerging conversation with the provincial government in Ontario around the potential of an investment fund into the music sector. That government was looking for a united voice to represent the key types of stakeholders who would need to be consulted, and so they were turning to associations and not only was there no live music association, but there was also no clear leadership committee or crew.

There was a group of people who were interested in a discussion around policy and ensuring that the priorities of the live music industry were purposefully, intentionally, centered in a broader government policy and investment conversation. So, they decided to get together and put some money in the pot and hire a warm-blooded human to sit in a chair and pull it all together. 

Who were the key players that hired you?
This list exists on our website. We call them the founding board members [The Agency Group; The Corporation of Massey Hall & Roy Thomson Hall; The Feldman Agency; Ticketmaster Canada; Union Events; Canadian Music Week; Collective Concerts; evenko; Global Spectrum; Live Nation; Music Canada; NXNE}. 

What were you doing at the time?
I was the executive director of the Canadian Arts Presenting Association, where I had been for seven or eight years. It was called Music Canada Live when it was first founded. I remember hearing about it and calling up Jesse, who had been on my board at CAPACOA, And I said, “We don’t need another association in this country. Let CAPACOA represent the commercial music industry because we already represent so many of the people you’re trying to reflect from what I can tell.” And he was like — it wasn’t just him — but it was like, “Nope, we’re good at this.” I threw my hat in the ring when I saw the job posting and we went from there. 

And up until that point was everyone protective of their worlds and their business and operating individually and not working together and sharing their needs or information? 
Yeah. One way I like to characterize this community is elbows out, proprietary, territorial entrepreneurs who don’t always like each other. And that’s what defines our success sometimes. I mean, it’s a very complex, competitive industry. And certainly, this association has been extremely meaningful in one thing, especially — and this was really at the heart of the mission — and that was to identify the common goals that we all had and meet there. 

The best way to cover these 10 years is to look at pre-COVID, during COVID, post-COVID. Those first years, what were the common goals and, more importantly, your accomplishments? 
We had to build everything. We had to build the framework that would house the systems that would move the mission. We didn’t have a board and staff handbook with guiding principles. We didn’t have bylaws.  We didn’t have a website. We didn’t have an email address. So right from the bottom up. That was about the first six months, and then we were ready.

Once we established the administrative foundation of the organization, we set off to build around those corporate objectives or pillars.  They were advocacy, research, business development, and networking. 
After the first six months of building some infrastructure, we set out to try to attract members. I had a manager many years ago, when I was an artist, who said it’s one handshake of a fan at a time, so it was one phone call after another. I knew a lot of people, having been in this adjacent business for a while, but I didn’t know everyone, especially in the commercial space or in the independent venue space. So it was a great learning curve for me.

Did you first concentrate on venues and then expand membership into other areas of the live business?
That’s a super important question, and I should have already addressed it because the founding board was very intentional and determined to define the membership as the entire ecosystem that really was responsible for putting an artist on the stage. So, the artists were not members, but the ecosystem that supported touring and live performance in this country needed to be. We call it a big tent, and that means small, medium, and large sized corporations and not-for-profits.

Did it also include lighting, sound, stage production, food services? 
It does to a certain extent. Our priorities pre-COVID were to recruit these core businesses and organizations, so venues, concert promoters, festivals, clubs, concert halls, stadiums, arenas, and then agents — because agents don’t have their own association, whereas managers do [Music Managers Forum Canada] — and we were also very intentional about not stepping on other associations’ feet. We were really trying to close gaps, not create new ones. That’s why you saw, and still today, an agent, at least one, on our board. The production folks, the technology folks, the staging companies are certainly part of our membership and always a growth area for us. 

What were the milestones in those five years leading up to COVID in early 2020?
In the five years that we had to establish the organization — in advance of what was [unknowingly] coming — we had to demonstrate value. That was something that we gained speed on, by delivering programs and services, like the Canadian Live Music Industry Awards, in partnership with Canadian Music Week, which we still do, to this day. But it was tough because this is not a community of joiners, especially on the commercial side.  “What’s an association? What are you going to do for me?” So, it was a bit of, “The power of the united voice, the common goals, and if we build it, they will come.” 

One of our key objectives was to leverage a financial investment through funding grants from different levels of government that never existed before, ever, and on behalf of certain commercial players. And so, we were able to try to build some momentum around these things that we felt were great opportunities and that we’ve been overlooked. My job is to bring us all together, start talking to each other and to everybody else. I define that as our internal story, really working together and sorting our shit out and really committing to the idea of the united voice, and then telling our story to government about our economic, social, and cultural power. 

That was compelling and brought a lot of people around the table. There were skeptics and there always will be in association management and leadership, but we had some good wins. We saw changes to legislation, here and there. It’s funny, if you’d asked me in 2019 about our wins, I would be able to rattle them off and they’d be the biggest wins we’d ever seen. And then COVID…

Imagine if the CLMA didn’t exist and COVID hit, it would have been a disaster. You really showed your worth and your commitment. You had a lot of work when the rest of us didn’t, getting help for the industry during the shutdown and for recovery.
No kidding, more work than I ever wanted. The biggest silver lining of COVID for the industry was it reinforced what the association had been saying — and let’s be clear, it wasn’t an Erin Benjamin win; it was a Canadian Live Music Association win — “We’re stronger together and here’s why…” and COVID couldn’t have made that more clear. 

And so, it was the internal and external. Internally, everyone was like, “We’re screwed, we gotta work together, no question.” I didn’t even have to say it anymore. In some ways, that was terrific.  I wish we didn’t have to go through that, but we did.  And then, externally, we were able to go to government and say, “If we lose the touring infrastructure outright in this country, where will the artists, who you have been investing in for decades, perform? And where will their audiences be?” What we had been trying to say to the federal government for our entire existence and I got laughed out of the room.  And I was more determined than ever because the point was that we’d been feeding various lanes of the sector, and these are segments of the industry that absolutely deserves and needs support and should continue to get it. It’s no secret that the federal government were able to provide emergency funding to labels in advance of live and artists because those were pre-existing relationships, and they knew who they were and why they mattered. And so, a lot of the scramble at the front end of COVID was helping government understand what it couldn’t until that point, which was that the ecosystem, the infrastructure, was intrinsic to the whole. 

How much did they give to the live industry? 
There are different numbers, but what we saw in the federal budget that year, the first time the word live music and venue appeared together in a sentence in the history of federal budget, that I’m aware of, was $70 million. And then, there were additional monies that were put into various programs that ultimately went to the industry. That budget was so important, not just because of the number, but because it was enshrined in an actual budget that made it very clear that these companies and organizations were considered valuable and important and worth saving. I think all told, it was well over $100 million.

Coming out of COVID, it took a while, lots of stops and starts. How is the government still committing to the live industry?
That’s not a black and white answer. When COVID ended, we were so worried that our association, and many others in hard-hit sectors, tourism especially, that folks would just go back to business as usual, in terms of their commitment to that united voice and understanding the power of working together.  We’ve seen that a bit, certainly in our sector, not to the extent pre-COVID. People got busy again and that’s a good problem. But what we also saw was governments at every level saying, “We’ve done everything we can, and you’re recovered.”  And of course, to this day, that remains untrue.

The convergence of that aftershock, and the continuation of aftershocks, and the implications of changing market forces have meant that recovery, or going back to the way things were, which is maybe not what we want anyway, has been really uneven and it looks different. So, the conversation with government has been unending.

It was in October 2024, when the federal government launched a pilot program called the Promoter Program through the Canada Music Fund, to be administered by FACTOR [and Musicaction]. For the first time in the history of ever, the commercial music industry was invited to apply for federal grants to support their activity. So, 10 years after the founding of the organization, we saw our first ever funding program for live music companies.  That program exists because of 10 years of advocacy with the CLMA. 

I could say one more thing about the transition from COVID to today and that is that what didn’t kill the live music industry has made us stronger and the leadership. That remains intact today are people who have been passionately committed to Canadian artists and Canadian fans from day one. They weren’t going to  let a little thing like COVID stand in their way, but it took resiliency. So many people I could name from coast to coast to coast in this country never gave up because they believe in what they do.

As we’ve all discovered, everything is just so expensive now and that’s often passed on to the consumer. Is that a direct result of COVID? 
COVID just set a bunch of things in motion that were maybe going to happen anyway. Now, the extent of inflation, I’m not an economist, but it does seem like the heights that we reached were pretty inconceivable. I don’t know about you, but I’m still paying like $4 for an avocado in my grocery store. And so, a result of COVID, a result of all the things that happened right after, a result of changing fan behavior, the supply chain chaos, which is really part of why prices got so high and supply and demand didn’t help, it was a perfect storm, especially small businesses trying to recover and not pass the increases onto the consumer. 

We just saw the Taylor Swift Effect in Toronto and Vancouver [$282 million and $157 million CAD, respectively]. Can that be replicated on a smaller scale?
Absolutely, it’s scalable. I just appeared before the Standing Committee on Finance [at the House of Commons] the other day in Ottawa to say exactly this, that if we’re looking for low-hanging fruit and a solution to some of our economic challenges, look no further than live music. This is where I talk about our economic impact study. The reality is, if we’re intentional about policy and investment strategies, and I’m not talking about throwing scads of money at the industry, but if we look at what drives a local economy, and if you’re uneducated, you think that entertainment is just there in your city, it’s a mistake. And it’s a chronic mistake that we see with live music, hence no emergency funding and a real fight to keep live music alive during COVID. So, if we are intentional about policy, and we understand how to incentivize live music activity in any local economy, and that’s through building relationships and partnerships and a deep understanding from the business community and the elected officials and on and on, then absolutely. 

And one of the things we’ve lost is that appetite for discovery. That’s why the Promoters Program, and the program that we just launched called Setting the Stage [10 micro grants], in partnership with RBC [bank], is about incentivizing risk-taking, so that we can get emerging artists back on the stages of our members.

I absolutely think we can get back there as people come through this “funflation” experience and start to really understand the connectivity between the role of a local live music economy and ecology plays to their quality of life where they live. I just think we’ve come far away from that right now, but I’m looking at downtowns reimagining themselves and other sectors solving issues that are connected to where we all live and wherever that may be. And this is, to me, is an obvious, affordable part of our solution around city building and downtown recovery, as well. 

We call it music tourism, but I’ve been doing it since my teens. I went to London for Live Aid, bought a ticket from a scalper with a traveler’s check. I went to Cuba to see the Stones, New York to see Springsteen, Vegas to see U2 — not to mention dozens of road trips to Montreal, Ottawa, Detroit, Buffalo and in between. That’s what music fans do. 
It’s a real thing.  Statistics show that arts and culture tourists stay longer and spend more. Cities and countries around the world are getting very serious about incentivizing music tourism. That’s why I’m hot on the notion for Canada, why I think it’s scalable. Tomorrow’s Taylor starts here. No matter what policy or grants were available, live music is a huge part of the culture of Canadians and it always will be. And COVID taught us a lot about things we took for granted.

I hope we stay really close to how to continue to improve all aspects of the industry and incentivize fans to not only get back to discovery shows, but to really understand where live music and its impact is situated in their own lives.  It’s absolutely standing at the back of the room and hearing a song that changes your life, but it also impacts your property taxes if you own a house. These things are all connected.

What can you reveal now about the economic impact study coming out?
Well, the numbers are really impressive and they’re very big. It’s a benchmark. This is the first ever economic impact study of live music in this country, ever, as far as I’m aware. We’ve done regional ones, but never a national one. The total impact of live music which would include the tourism piece is contributing over $10 billion to Canada’s GDP [in 2023 alone] and creating over 100,000 jobs and we are 10% of tourism activity in this country. It’s massive. It’s great to have a benchmark because I’ve said this from day one, 10 years ago we needed to quantify our ability to impact all the things economically, socially, culturally, so that we can say, “What does growth look like?” and not just growth for growth’s sake, but for artists and for fans and for communities. So, we have these numbers that will open doors because every great industry has great economic stats and now we do.