Einstein may have correctly posited that information “is not knowledge,” but the lack of it is a non-starter. David Farrell has been providing vital information to the broad spectrum of the Canadian music industry for almost four decades. With his current publication, FYI Music News, he provides, free and digitally, a digest of pertinent news and events for music industry professionals, government agencies, associations, musicians, and fans, directly to their device of choice.

While there was a brief hiccup at the beginning of the pandemic, Farrell regularly downloads around 300 e-mails per day, from which he cherry-picks the most urgent, interesting, thought-provoking, and simply helpful items, turning them into features, interviews, reviews, and bullet-form précis for his three-times-weekly releases (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). Choosing which items make the cut isn’t difficult.

An Accomplished Editor

Back in the ‘70s Farrell held, among other titles, that of Canadian Editor for Billboard. In the ‘80s, he (and his then-wife Patricia Dunn) founded the weekly Canadian music industry bible, The Record, and ran that for some 20 years, during which he also helped found Canadian Music Week, the annual national convention for the music biz. FYI was launched, with the support of The Slaight Foundation, CIMA, and Music Canada, in 2000. The depth of Farrell’s understanding of, and experiences within, Canadian music is unfathomable – hence his induction into the Canadian Music & Broadcast Industry Hall of Fame in 2018.

“News is news,” Farrell audibly shrugs, over the phone from his Toronto headquarters, and it flows unrelentingly, plagues or not. Items are selected “on the weight of the story itself,” says Farrell. “How it affects people, the substance of the story. Money is always an interest and, in my particular case, it’s a wide gamut in the fact that I’m not only just dealing with the publishing industry, but the live industry, the recording industry, the artists’ side of the business. It’s a big lens.”

Each edition includes up to 50 or so items. Farrell likens laying out FYI to assembling “a jigsaw puzzle, because we publish three times a week, and each one will include at least 10 new items (but on Wednesday we have 14). Of that 10, we’ll have a Track of the Day, we have music digests (and you can put 20 to 30 items in that) – headlines that catch a lot of interest in Canada and abroad that appear in mainstream press, from Rolling Stone to The Globe and Mail.

“Even though we have a limited editorial team, we cover a pretty wide gamut. Of the stories themselves, it’s evident when they come in what their priority status will be. It’s rarely a publication day that I don’t have at least one story that stands out and says: This is the lead story.” Farrell has a small team of writers, primarily Kerry Doole (a regular contributor to Words & Music), Bill King, and Jason Schneider, along with other freelancers.

“Day to day, it’s Kerry and I,” says Farrell. “One of the astonishing aspects that we scratch our heads over is: There are two metrics we can use to judge a story’s acceptance [by readers]. One is the number of views, and the other is the number of shares that it gets.” Some stories, “just seem to have a life of their own, and that’s always surprising.”

As an example, he cites an announcement from Heritage Canada that was in FYI on a Friday, and by the following week had 4,500 shares on Facebook. A piece by [Blackie & The Rodeo Kings’] Tom Wilson about living in isolation had about 2,000 shares. “But there are other stories that we bust our ass on,” he says,  “and [they] might get 11 shares. You try to gauge that as the audience interest. I’m not writing for clickbait, but it’s always surprising what works and what doesn’t.”

Coverage during COVID

“In as far as how the pandemic [has] affected the flow of news,” Farrell says, “I’ve used it to personalize [FYI] a lot more, to reach out as a news reporter and ask people to express how it’s affecting them. From a financial point of view, but also, what I’ve come to accept, how mental health has become a big issue… A large number of [our readers] are used to working in groups, and so isolation can be very debilitating for artists. I think they require, to a large degree, an audience to respond to their work. Being cut off from that can be very unnerving.  Two months in, we’ve seen a certain amount of agility amongst [artists] to transfer their creations from first person in person, to online. It’s early days. In a matter of weeks, we’ve seen people being able to marshal different platforms and equipment and put on increasingly more sophisticated performances… Companies led by a lot of Canadians have shown a lot of initiative, they’ve shown a lot of ingenuity, a lot of calm, a lot of leadership and it looks like even though their business has cratered they’re finding ways to put on shows.”