Curators

When you apply for a Curator account you can create a profile that includes:

  • organizational details 
  • links to where people can find out more about your organization
  • playlists of the music you think other OIMA users should check out 
  • a blog to highlight the work your organization is doing 
  • a place to upload music made by musicians you work with for the public to download  
  • a Creative Commons licence the artists sign-off on to protect their rights to their music 

OIMA is a place to let people know more about the work you already do to support independent musicians in Ontario. Tell them in your profile and regular blog entries, and let them hear it for themselves by preserving recordings of live performances and artist interviews.    

For copyright reasons, all songs on OIMA must be original compositions or traditional songs in the public domain. This means no covers. Curators must also get a signed OIMA Artist Release before uploading any recordings. We reserve the right to take down any music that doesn't meet our submission criteria. Read our terms of use. 

Click here to apply for a curator account. You will need to create a profile first on this site if you haven't already done so.

What counts as music from Ontario? 

A song is considered Ontarian, and suitable for OIMA, if it meets any one of the follow criteria:

  • the artist or majority of artists comprising the group that created the song were born in Ontario
  • the artist or group are currently based in Ontario (and have been for at least six months) and the song was recorded during their time in Ontario
  • the artist or group previously lived in Ontario for at least five years and the song to be archived was recorded during that time  

What counts as independent music? 

This is like asking people what it means for something to be "cool" or how to define good taste:  there is no universally accepted definition. The most basic definition of an independent musician is based on whether or not the musician is signed to one of the major, corporate record labels: Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music Group. If you're not, then you’re independent! 
 
To others, being an independent musician has nothing to do with record label affiliation but is more of an ethos about the way music is created and shared.
 
The 2006 Canadian film What is Indie? A look into the world of independent musicians explores what it means to be an independent
musician through artist and industry representative interviews. It concludes that being an independent musician “refers to a philosophy based on a proactive approach to one’s career; retaining complete artistic control to maintain the integrity of one’s art, regardless of record label affiliation.” Sounds good to us. 
 
Which is to say: use your best judgement. If an artist from Ontario self-identifies as being "independent" then once they sign the OIMA Artist Release you’re welcome to put their original music up on the Archive! (As long as it also abides by our terms of use, of course. Hey, and did I mention our terms of use?)