kingston city council renews support for music strategy
kingston extends year-old music strategy with a focus improving musicians wages
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musician michael broadhead speaks to kingston city council in kingston, ont. on tuesday, may 20, 2025.
(elliot ferguson/the whig-standard/postmedia network)
elliot ferguson
/
the whig-standard
kingston — city council renewed its support for a local music strategy tuesday night, committing $200,000 to fund tourism kingston’s music office.
the funding is meant to foster the local music scene through the municipality’s music strategy, which seeks to help local musicians succeed by improving access to performance and rehearsal space, creating connections among and enhance the profile of performers.
much of the music strategy is geared toward increasing the amount of money musicians earn.
“i deeply care about this issue and music strategy specifically because i want our city to be sustainable and i’m concerned that things like the housing crisis are reaching a point where we cannot sustain things like this anymore,” musician michael broadhead told council.
“what i’m seeing is a mass burnout of promoters and people in the diy scene and people leaving kingston despite the music strategy.”
broadhead said the strategy should prioritize improving musician compensation and ensuring spaces are available for musicians to create.
“if other people are sacrificing their love of the game, the landlord needs to as well,” he said. “if people are expecting to invest and then make profit off those investments, everybody should be able to make a living.”
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danika lochhead, director of the city’s arts and culture services, said work to raise the amount of money musicians are paid is a key goal of the music strategy.
“the music strategy does include strategic action to develop a fair wage policy for the city of kingston,” she said. “we’ll really look at mandating a fair wage for musicians for all city of kingston-sponsored events, city of kingston partner events, but i think more broadly to sort of also act as a tool to advocate sector-wide, community wide, for the value of paying musicians with a fair wage.
“the city doesn’t have mandate to mandate fair wage elsewhere, but we do have the capacity to lead by example and bring into policy this fair wage and hopefully encourage others to do the same,” she added.
elferguson@postmedia.com
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