by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Yanik Hardy

Age: 33

Occupation: SOCAN field rep

Bio: Eight years ago this tenacious Villeray trooper was driving a forklift in a Drummondville textile factory and living at his parents' digs. Rejecting the obvious course of action and blowing his head off, he one morning stumbled across a classified ad in Le Journal de Montréal calling for bilingual field reps to come work for SOCAN. Armed with a BA in English lit and a love of popular music, he sent in his résumé, got called for an interview and a couple weeks later found himself gainfully employed by the organization. Now Yanik spends his days travelling la belle province, collecting music licence fees from bars, restaurants, discothèques and pretty well any other commercial establishment that pipes music in to their hall.

What the hey a SOCAN is: SOCAN is the non-profit Canadian performance rights organization that collects performance royalties for domestic and international songwriters. Theoretically, every time you hear "Band on the Run" on the radio or at some happenin' rave, SOCAN will be doing their darndest to make sure Paul McCartney gets financially compensated.

His company car: A sexy-looking 2003 Dodge Caravan.

How often bar owners bitch about having to fork over a licence fee just so pricks like Michael Jackson can get even richer? "All the time. But often they don't fully understand how important music is to their business, and well, you have to pay for that. It's only reasonable. If they don't want to pay the licence fee, they can always just play the radio in their establishment. That's fine. And most of our members are not big stars like Celine Dion, you know. Sometimes this is the only revenue songwriters receive."

When he goes collecting in strip bars does he let it be known that he's prepared to make "special arrangements" for dancers who can perhaps think of another way to pay for the songs they've been using in their acts? "Of course not. And I don't deal with the staff anyway, it's the bar owner who's responsible for the licence fees."

Is it fun walking into a Hells Angels-owned establishment, say like Le Bar Sexy Bitch way out in the country somewhere, and telling Gros André the manager that he'd better pay up if he wants his dancers to strip to anything other than the radio? "Um, we don't profile our music licence customers like that."

Do club owners ever offer up the argument that music is a shared cultural experience which comes from and belongs to the community, and that what he and his cronies at SOCAN are doing is essentially commodifying culture, and to aid in this process is to effectively compromise the continued existence of meaningful art? "Uh, no, I don't hear that very often."

Childhood ambition: To become a pro drummer.

The artist currently spinning in his CD player: Vincent Vallières.

Last book read: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

Words of wisdom: "Live free or die. And that applies no matter where you are in the world."

Comments? dimwit@openface.ca