To Find Success, Canadian Artists Need to Double as Businesspeople

Halifax-based Ben Caplan is one of many Canadian artists who are at the helm of their careers, handling the business side of their music.
To Find Success, Canadian Artists Need to Double as Businesspeople
Ben Caplan, a Nova Scotia musician, is seen in Halifax March 6, 2013. Caplan runs his career as a small business and takes responsibility for marketing, promoting, and controlling his artistic expression. The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan
The Canadian Press
Updated:

HALIFAX—With his extravagant wiry beard, thick black-rimmed glasses, and a mop of unruly hair, Ben Caplan doesn’t look like a typical businessman.

But the Halifax-based musician is one of many Canadian artists who are at the helm of their careers, handling the business side of their music.

It’s a rising trend in the music industry, said Caplan.

“If you want to make a living as a musician, particularly as a songwriter, I think you have to have some entrepreneurial sensibility,” the folk singer-songwriter said in a recent interview, sipping black coffee from a white ceramic mug at a bustling north-end Halifax cafe.

There aren't labels handing out money to people on experiments. Those days are gone.
Musician Ben Caplan