A technicality that prevented Lori Yates from submitting her album Matador for consideration exposes the conflict between what an indie artist needs and an industry behemoth requires.

By Nick Krewen

Special to the Star

In a move that illustrates the conflict between what a musician feels may be best for her career and standard music-industry practices, a veteran Toronto recording artist’s album has been denied entry for Juno Award consideration because she was told the work “wasn’t released properly.”

Lori Yates, who was nominated for a Juno in 1990 for Country Female Vocalist of the Year, says she is feeling slighted after trying to submit her acclaimed 2024 album Matador in the Contemporary Roots Album of the Year category, only to be notified by representatives of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) — the organization that presents the annual awards celebrating the best of Canadian music — that it didn’t qualify because she didn’t release it on a streaming service. Instead, she put it on Bandcamp, a popular digital retailer that serviced 24,000 Canadian artists over the 12 past months, selling more than 600,000 of their tracks at an average price of $1, with 80 per cent of that amount going directly to the musicians.

The nine tracks of Matador were submitted to Spotify and Apple Music in time for the Nov. 7, 2024, deadline to qualify for the 2025 Junos, but they were not bundled as an album, leading to her disqualification on a technicality.

“The issue is that they don’t like the way I released my record,” Yates told the Star. “I released my singles via Spotify and my album on Bandcamp. So, that’s where the contention is. It’s such red tape.”

Allan Reid, president and CEO of CARAS, wrote in an e-mail to the Star that all products must be made available on a digital service provider to be considered for a Juno Award nomination — and that Bandcamp is included in consumer-driven consumption categories like Album of the Year, Artist of the Year and Group of the Year, where both sales and streams, and sometimes radio airplay, factor in.

“The project was not deemed ineligible because her album wasn’t available on Spotify specifically, but because it was not released on any nationally recognized digital service provider (DSP),” he wrote, adding that artists aren’t penalized for releasing music on Bandcamp.

“This season, we updated our eligibility criteria to require that music be available on a nationally recognized digital service provider (DSP) for consideration.

“This change reflects evolving industry standards and ensures submissions are accessible on platforms that provide broad, on-demand streaming capabilities. While Bandcamp does offer a digital element for previewing and purchasing music, its primary function is as a sales platform rather than a streaming service. Therefore, Bandcamp is included in our consumption data for sales but not streaming.”

CARAS’s submission guidelines, available on the Juno Awards website, state, “Product must be released to a nationally accessible streaming service that has paid subscriptions, full catalogue, or on-demand streaming,” but they don’t mention that the music needs to be in album form.

The Oshawa-born Yates, an acclaimed alternative country/Americana singer-songwriter who has released six albums over the last 40 years, argued that she had a specific strategy for putting her singles on Spotify and Apple Music and her album on Bandcamp: to build anticipation, she’d release a song every six weeks on the streaming services beginning Oct. 29, 2023, and then issue Matador as a whole on Bandcamp on Jan. 29, 2024, culminating in an album-release concert.

“This might be my last record, and I want to make sure that all the doors were open,” explained Yates, 63, who released her first three albums on major labels (Columbia, EMI Music Canada and Virgin) before going independent with 2007’s The Book of Minerva.

“I released singles. I went on a tour. There was a lot of talk about (Matador) all year long because every six weeks there was a new single. That’s the way to do it. It’s an old-fashioned model.

“I was trying to get as much life and length out of it as possible … Over 100,000 songs are released daily on (Spotify), so why would you focus on releasing an album on there?”

After paying the $100 fee to CARAS for her Contemporary Roots Album of the Year submission by Nov. 1, Yates said she was contacted by the organization on Nov. 11 — after the eligibility deadline had passed — and informed that Matador was ineligible.

After speaking with a CARAS representative, Yates did end up compromising, begrudgingly submitting three songs in the Songwriter of the Year category — one she felt she “had a snowball’s chance in Hell” of winning.

“I feel like I was placated,” Yates said. “That’s not what I was looking for.”

Jamelia Campbell, CARAS’s director of communications, told the Star in an e-mail that Yates was offered the chance to convert the singles she had placed on streaming services into an album, in order to qualify for her preferred category. The musician said that wasn’t the case.

“I didn’t know,” Yates said. “I would have done it had I known.”

As for the Contemporary Roots Album category, it is one of many of the 46 categories that — as confirmed by Campbell — requires no sales or streaming metrics to determine a nomination beyond qualifying.

Campbell explained how nominations are decided: “Ten anonymous judges who are experts in the respective genre and/or technical discipline participate in voting. They are demographically and geographically diverse and are selected based on their unbiased roles within the music industry.”

There are two rounds of voting. The first determines a category’s five nominees; the second, decided by those same 10 judges, determines the eventual winner.

But that still begs the question: Why does a submitted album need to be available on a DSP if consumption data isn’t required in the nomination process? And for an artist releasing an album on Bandcamp or, say, iTunes — both of which make the music available for purchase around the world — why isn’t that considered as acceptable a format as streaming, which pays artists less money to essentially rent their music?

Yates doesn’t have the answers, but she says a lot of her musician friends avoid placing their music on DSPs because the return isn’t promising.

“A lot of people aren’t consciously on Spotify, because it’s not a great platform for many indie artists,” she said, adding that despite the global reach of DSPs, she’s only received $100 in royalties since releasing the Matador songs.

She said she makes far more money from touring and selling physical copies and T-shirts.

While she’s aware that simply submitting her work for Junos consideration does not guarantee a nomination, Yates says she’s disappointed that she’s not even in the running for the one category she felt she belonged in and had a chance at winning.

“A Juno nomination can result in extra life for the album, and a higher profile for better gigs,” she said. “It opens doors and allows a lot more work to come your way.

“It holds a lot of credibility.”

The Juno nominations will be announced Feb. 11.