“WIND Mobile a ‘cautionary tale’ for other new cellphone players to enter market” reported the Canadian Press last week, regarding a report from market research and technology firm the SeaBoard Group. Buoyed by its Egyptian ownership’s enthusiasm for successfully lobbying to compete in Canada after a protracted protectionist struggle, parent company Globalive Wireless has spent much on marketing WIND since December, and suspicion is that few are taking the bait of their $130 Huwaei U7519 handset — not to mention complaints over sporadic service and wobbly billing. Turns out a campaign playing to the view that Bell, Rogers and Telus are all about price gouging may well have backfired. The chief customer officer behind their marketing campaign exited earlier this month amidst speculation that things weren’t going very well. The offer of $150 credit to offset cancellation fees to anyone who dumps their current provider was singled out as a lousy idea that provides a lesson for emerging competitors Mobilicity and Public Mobile: “We’re going to see some more creativity now that WIND has shown what not to do,” said Seaboard managing director Iain Grant. WIND are now taking a page from the Richard Branson playbook for Virgin Mobile and inviting media to to cover their festivities this Friday at Yonge-Dundas Square — only, without a CEO to trapeze off a building, or pose with scantily-clad nurses, or introduce the casts of Glee or Gossip Girl, they have to settle on a rival-busting “Contract Carnival”. Paper-airplanes, piñatas, paper mâché and origami are part of the festivities, along with a caricaturist, a magician — and, of course, crews shooting awkward footage they will dust off when things really start shaking down.

Sketchy plans for the IMAGINE Music and Arts Festival surfaced on Torontoist last month, reprinted the following day in The Globe and Mail, with a promise to reveal more details in mid-March. Well, that is now, and they have a bit more of a website, and — the vow to resurrect the spirit of Woodstock at Downsview Park looks like it’s taking a shape. But the biggest concert in Toronto history? Artie Kornfeld, who helped arrange the original 3 Days of Peace and Music, might have been sharing the brown acid with his Canadian collaborators in the project. The concert program so far indicates three different stages: one will be a tribute to The Beatles, another to Pink Floyd, another to Led Zeppelin. Claims by co-founder David Kam that the likes of Nickelback and Lady Gaga “have been contacted” to perform on July 10 and 11 obviously didn’t get far enough for them to re-route their summer tours — not that this crew had the connections to put on something like the 2003 Molson-sponsored event where the Rolling Stones and AC/DC headlined Downsview to deflect attention away from SARS. Now, at a time when classic rock tribute acts are able to fill the fanciest theatres, it’s not impossible to get a few hacky sackers and their grandparents to come out to hang in a corner of the park — but the banners on the IMAGINE website, alternatively suggesting “500,000 dreamers” and “1,000,000 dreamers” were going to flood into the site for this eco-conscious event looks ridiculously optimistic. Continue Reading

It’s not everyday that an investor uses a magazine like Canadian Business to extend an invitation to any reader with $25 million to spare to wash their hands of an iconic entertainment brand — but so goes Death Row Records, whose music catalogue was unexpectedly won at a bankruptcy auction in early 2009 by a private Toronto bank, New Solutions Capital Group, headed by Robert Thompson-So. “This is just another commercial loan transaction that started as a workout and continues to be a workout,” he says. “Please — step up to the table and take us out.” He has a rival in Lara Lavi, the American woman hired to shape WIDEawake Entertainment into a player on the urban music scene, using reissues by the gangsta rap stable assembled in the mid-1990s by Suge Knight to establish their credibility. “I’d suggest the words to use for a company like New Solutions in the context of this is ‘financial vampires,’” Lavi says today, court ordered to steer clear of the 6,000 square foot studios and event space in Liberty Village that the company opened earlier this month. But now Lavi asserts that they didn’t know what they were doing, even while she entangled herself in their complex financial arrangement, which reportedly led the others involved in the Death Row resurrection to contend with her ego: she signed her name in emails as “Lara, gangsta soccer mom.” Now she claims to be ready to settle, and acquire the label herself — not disclosing how she plans to finance it. Regardless, when this is settled, the ghost of Tupac Shakur’s stint in Toronto will likely have proven as fleeting as the past local residencies of George Clinton or Rick James.

Canadian Music Week, the industry conference concurrent with the public Canadian Music Fest, will again pack many conference rooms at the Fairmont Royal York with satin-jacketed 20th century refugees wondering what comes next. For the live music business, though, the future involves a trend that few of those executives seem too willing to admit exists: the big-ticket legitimization of the tribute act.  While collective media enthusiasm is feigned for a few hundred indie bands slogging it out, all of that practice, practice, practice won’t lead to playing Massey Hall — especially when they’re up against shows like Queen — It’s A Kinda Magic, reaching that stage on March 19. (Coincidentally, the same night, an orchestral Music of Queen show is booked at Casino Rama.) This production from Australia, starring Craig Pesco as Freddie Mercury, prominently touts an endorsement from the late Queen singer’s 12-year personal assistant, Peter Freestone: “It’s wonderful to see the poses, and arm and hand movements again.” He has seen the future of rock and roll and its name is necrophilia. Continue Reading