Fortress Of Freedom Board

[Maurice Ali]

2025 SOCAN AGM!




By Maurice Ali, President & CEO
Fortress of Freedom Inc.
FOF Records Inc.
FOFSTOCK
FOF Entertainment Inc.




Well, we had the 2025 SOCAN AGM meeting on May 21 (2025) in Toronto, Canada.




SOCAN President and Chair Marc Ouellette briefly interviewed Léo Boisvert of Mila, the Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute.



SOCAN collects musician royalties up here in Canada and collected over half a billion dollars last year. But why is it that nobody seems to get anything but pennies anymore. The CFO (Rob Bennett) said operating expenses were just 12 percent. So where is the 450 million going? Presumably to a fewer and fewer amount of artists but this was not clearly addressed.




SOCAN Chief Financial Officer Rob Bennett



The CEO (Jennifer Brown) talked about the impact of AI and streaming/social platforms getting around royalty payments using the “Fair Use” argument. That and AI scraping are killing the music industry. Yet she said going back to the way it was has passed and we have to live with AI. So we shall see if they allow AI assisted music to be registered or not in the coming months.




SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown



I’ll have a proper report when the voting is finalized in two days from the date of the AGM. We did vote online for the minutes of the last AGM and picking the auditors for this year.




A vote at the SOCAN AGM!



The actually AGM was only a few minutes and two votes. The bulk of the two hours was a talk with President and Chair Marc Ouellette and AI scholar Léo Boisvert (of Mila, the Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute) for thirty minutes at the beginning and after the voting we had the CFO, CEO and others making statements and then a question and answer segment to end the event.



More updates to this story as they become available.




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