Friday, June 6, 2008

Messing with Religion


OK , as a Canadian it doesn't get any closer to religion than Hockey Night in Canada. It's a tradition going back over a half century to congregate weekly at the altar of television and watch our heroes and icons perform.

Hockey Night in Canada says that they will no longer be using the traditional theme song for their broadcast because of a contract dispute with the composer of the song.
They say it's "No big deal" because if they can't settle the contract they will simply start a contest to create a new theme song. Simple right?

Well, this would be as popular with the traditional Canadian hockey fan as throwing out the hymn book at church and replacing it with Karaoke. It just doesn't work.

Make it work CBC! Make it work!

There has to be a simple solution.

It turns out that the composer of the song sued the CBC a few years ago because of a royalty dispute about extra money for foreign telecasts which are not part of the existing contract. Details of the money involved were not released by either side, so likely both are being somewhat unreasonable.

The CBC pays the NHL hundreds of millions for the rights to broadcast the games, I think they could throw a few bucks towards the composer to make this work and keep us humming along for years to come.

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