[Event] In Toronto TONIGHT (Feb. 9): TownHall Meeting on the Shutdown of CKLN

This post is stickied to the top of the site until Wednesday night. New posts will follow below but T.dot heads: PAY ATTENTION TO THIS!!!

I touched on this briefly on twitter earlier yesterday but let’s get into it properly now. Here’s the deal:

ALL Toronto Hip-Hop Heads:

The imminent shutdown of CKLN (whether through faults of their own doing or not) on Feb. 12 and the attendant shutdown of all the specialty shows on the station including the long-running city institution, the Saturday 1-4PM rap show currently inhabited by The Mixtape Massacre is one thing (and I explained in a little detail on Saturday why that was such a blow to the hip hop scene in Toronto). But the wholesale cleaning of shop of all the hip-hop mix-shows including the long-running Real Frequency Show and Ty & Rez Digital’s OTA Live on the main ‘urban’ commercial station in town, FLOW 93.5 as part of it’s sale to the CHUM Radio Group last week also was a double blow to the city’s still emergent urban music industry.

Kids: don’t take it for granted that the hip-hop you love will always be so freely accessible as it has been over the past few years. As you can see, the mass channels of access on the radio can easily be shut down with just a few swift actions and all of a sudden, we’re back to 1985 and hearing barely a couple of hours a week of hip-hop on the radio.

Y’all can have your little viewpoints on whether TRF and OTA Live were adequately doing what they should or not as far as promoting local music, but be clear: artists like Drake, Kardinal Offishall, K’naan and Shad did not break in a vacuum or strictly through commercial channels. In one form or another, they all paid dues and built a base from which they went on to achieve success by first stating at or benefiting from the support of underground and specialty radio shows like these.

“Yeah, but there’s always the internet, Ian” you might say pointing to the rampant file-sharing and “let one million hip-hop blogs bloom” landscape and the font of endless hip-hop music-on-tap its given us as proof. In response to that, I would say though: DON’T BE SO SURE…..

Here’s the ‘official’ plug for Tonight’s event set up by Manifesto to discuss the implication of these events:

What Just Happened?

SPREAD THE WORD!

If you can make it to this, YOU SHOULD GO!!! Even if you (think you) haven’t got anything to contribute, now is the time to show the ‘powers that be’ that there’s numbers in the community and we care about decisions that are being made about us. So be there, I will – hearing the music you love in an accessible way in the future may very well depend on it!

[Promo Video] One Solution to Satisfy All (EU PSA)

This a spot for cell phone chargers! Europe is the only place an ad like this could have been conceived, methinks!

CLICK HERE to learn more….

[note: this is a PPC thang via the goviral network]

[Promo Video] TRD (Tobacco Related Deaths) PSA

“Mo Iqbal, explores the negative practices in the marketing of cigarettes and the depiction of smoking in the media in his film TRD (Tobacco Related Deaths), starring actor, Matt Littler, actress Carly Stenson, as well as singer, Natasha Hamilton.”

[this is a PPC thing courtesy Goviral network and Smoke & Mirrors]

[Promo Video] One Solution to Satisfy All (EU PSA)

This a spot for cell phone chargers! Europe is the only place an ad like this could have been conceived, methinks!

CLICK HERE to learn more….

[note: this is a PPC thang via the goviral network]

[Promo Video] TRD (Tobacco Related Deaths) PSA

“Mo Iqbal, explores the negative practices in the marketing of cigarettes and the depiction of smoking in the media in his film TRD (Tobacco Related Deaths), starring actor, Matt Littler, actress Carly Stenson, as well as singer, Natasha Hamilton.”

[this is a PPC thing courtesy Goviral network and Smoke & Mirrors]