It was a middle-aged man and his Frisbee-throwing robot that tipped me off. The guy appeared one night during a TV commercial for the Washington State Lottery. My prime-time stupor was interrupted by this gray-haired man – who I was led to believe had just won the jackpot – working in his garage. He’s building something, but it’s not clear exactly what. It involves welding.

Then he loads his contraption into a pickup truck with his friendly dog. Moments later, he’s on a beach, unpacking – wait for it – a robot! Not just any robot, though. This one throws Frisbees via remote control. The dog loves it. The ad closes with the optimistic tagline, “Whose world could you change?”

My first thought was: really? Dogs and robots – that’s how this guy spends his windfall? My second thought concerned the music. The soundtrack to this tender bit of messaging was a song called “Seeds of Night” by the Cave Singers. It was from the Seattle trio’s 2007 album Invitation Songs.

Instead of convincing me that building canine-friendly robots was something I had been missing out on, the one-minute ad served as a window through which I discovered a new band. As it turns out, the experience was anything but unique. “I think advertising and television commercials are sort of like the new radio,” says Danielle Lindy, who licenses songs for a living. “If Apple does a huge campaign, you really start to wonder: who is that artist?”

That’s essentially the kind of serendipitous fortune that befell Leslie Feist following the release of her sophomore album, The Reminder. In September 2007, the Toronto songstress appeared in a TV campaign for one of Apple’s iPod devices. Record sales before the ad launched in the U.S. averaged about 6,000 units per week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks industry sales figures.

In the week after Feist’s song “1234” appeared in the Apple spot, sales for The Reminder jumped to 14,000 units. The next week they were 19,000. Three weeks after the campaign initially aired, sales peaked at 28,000 copies of the disc. Feist’s catchy single landed her on the Billboard charts and, ultimately, paved the way for an appearance as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live. “If you can land a big spot, a big campaign, you can certainly launch your career,” says Lindy, whose company represents Sally Seltmann, an Australian songwriter who co-wrote “1234.”

There’s hardly anything new about advertising jingles. What’s changed is that companies are no longer satisfied by the United Furniture Warehouse approach to selling products. Trite little ditties no longer cut it. Increasingly, companies – through ad agencies – want to be seen as tastemakers, says Lindy. New and emerging artists are particularly appealing. At the same time, bands and record labels are coping with changing consumer habits. “Labels don’t have the same kind of money and their deals aren’t as big,” says Lindy, recalling days when the recording industry as a whole rivalled Big Oil in size and stature. “Selling is different. People are buying singles. They’re not buying full albums.”

The return of the single is important for another reason. When I was a teenager, discovering new music was much more of a contact sport. Hearing a band for the first time meant physically leaving the house and standing elbow-to-elbow with other stinky kids in suburban YMCAs, neighbourhood basements and – a rarity – dingy clubs with a roped-off section for underage fans. The opposite seems true today. “I think people now more than ever know they can go and find whatever they’re hearing pretty easily,” says Ian Stanger, co-founder of Mississauga, Ont.-based Black Box Music (BBM). “It used to be you’d have to go to a store. There were no resources to go and figure out what you just heard that you enjoyed so much. So from a consumer perspective, it’s made things a lot easier.”

Examples of bands turning to TV for added exposure and a better paycheque abound. Toronto’s Major Maker managed to spin a hit song out of a half-track the duo wrote for a Telus ad. Todor Kobakov, a classically trained pianist and one half of the twosome, has since composed scores for Vodafone and British fruit-juice giant Robinsons. (The latter was a tennis-themed spot that ran during Wimbledon 2010, Britain’s marquee tournament). Department store Zellers used a song by Juno award-winners Bedouin Soundclash in a national campaign. In the U.S., Washington DC-based ESL Music has licensed songs to TV shows Sex and the City and The West Wing. ESL artist Thievery Corporation has licensed tracks to shows like True Blood, Entourage and Six Feet Under, among others. The group’s electronic grooves have helped hock high-end products like Skyy Vodka, Jaguar and Lexus, too.

For upstart indie labels like Black Box, major licensing deals are perhaps harder to come by. Still, music from the label’s roster – which includes Polaris-prize finalist, wordsmith and all around nice guy Shad – has shown up on a surprising number of playlists. Among the more prominent outlets, Stanger counts an instalment of the Tony Hawk video game series, So You Think You Can Dance Canada and Rogers Sportsnet. Are marketers looking for one genre of music above another? “It’s tough to say,” says the former punk-rock frontman. “I think it varies from genre to genre. People are always on the lookout for hip hop, but specifically they’re looking for hip hop that doesn’t have samples and that doesn’t include any profanity, and sometimes that can be a difficult thing to find.”

Finding the right score to accompany an ad campaign is a job best left to musical matchmakers like Lindy. In her day job with Toronto-based Girth Music, she works to pair companies and music supervisors from TV shows and films with indie artists keen to earn something more than a per diem income. She recently licensed a Plants and Animals track from the band’s latest album, La La Land, to the MTV series The Hills.

As a part-time singer who has lent her voice to ad campaigns for Mattel products and the Sheraton Hotels chain, the licensing rep has no time for murky arguments about artists selling either themselves or their craft short. “These things aren’t linear anymore,” she says. For the countless indie acts getting set to crisscross Canada on sometimes-brutal winter tours especially, “It’s a great way to get exposure and there’s nothing wrong with doing it, as long as you’re comfortable with the brand or the campaign.”

It’s easy to envy Ryan Clarke and Tanya Bach. They live in a cute house and sleep until they wake up, usually noon. After breakfast they head to the basement. A step from the workshop, Bach deposits Little Miss, their puppy, into a playpen full of chew toys. Clarke double clicks on a BBC sitcom. Bach chooses a couple reams of coloured vinyl. After a few sips of coffee, she sits down at a low table beside the vinyl cutter. He starts to work on electronic components. They can both see the computer.

Collectively, this guitar pedal-making duo is called Dr. Scientist. Friends and family didn’t get it at first. (“What’s a guitar petal?”) Even the couple, who live just east of Edmonton, had panic attacks, wondering whether their ultra-specialized niche business would pay the rent.

Guitar pedals add a little something to the electric riff. There are devices for distortion, chorus, delay, reverb. You name it. The standard fare is a painted metal box with knobs and a button to step on.

Dr. Scientist’s contraptions are different. A lot of love goes into these babies. Clarke, 32, studied electronics engineering, and Bach, 25, took sign- making. They met at a NAIT hangout where Tanya was a server. He played guitar, she did vinyl art. Their relationship got serious. So did the business plan.

“He thought the pedals needed something to make them look really cool,” Bach recalls. “Spray paint didn’t work.”

Using her vinyl skills, she created a theme for each pedal style. Sunny Day Delay looks the part with a white-picket fence and blue sky. The Cleanness has a bright retro print. The Frazz Dazzler bears their unofficial logo, a robot. They also do custom jobs: Bach designed an orca motif for one band and a ninja kitty for another.

As for the sound, sites like guitargeek.com sing the pedals’ praises and music mag SLUG declared Frazz the new fuzz. Pretty good for a company that doesn’t actively sell its product, and never has.

At first, Bach worked but Clarke lived on small business loans, getting his designs down and the website up. The site was tight. He had a flash animator create it as a space fantasy and wrote the copy in the persona of a cosmic mad scientist. He also posted plenty of meaty sound clips from the pedals. Their URL hit the big guitar forums and by its August 2006 launch, Dr. Scientist had 100 orders, some from shops in the U.S., England and Denmark. Now they fill hundreds of orders a month, each pedal selling for $150 to $250. Just like that, their biz went global. The question changed from “Can we eat?” to “How do we keep up?”

“We’re just so lucky,” Clarke says, gesturing towards Bach, the puppy and their blissful workspace, “to be doing exactly what we want to do.”

Three years ago, I got a call from a theatre friend who scouts for a local talent agency about a television commercial being shot in Calgary that required a man to play guitar and sing. I auditioned for the McCain’s International Series Thin Crust Texas Barbecue Chicken Pizza ad, waiting in a holding pen with the majority of the city’s roots-rock singer/songwriters. Most of us were wearing country suits and western hats. The commercial’s story arc was brilliant: a young cowboy rises spontaneously from a long table of pizza-eating family and friends and woos a pretty cowgirl at the head of the table by singing “Yellow Rose of Texas.”

I hammed it up when it was my turn, getting down on my knees as though I were pleading. I played the song faster and more energetically than the original and was called back to audition again for the commercial’s director, an L.A. industry type with blonde, shoulder-length hair and a tangible air of self-assurance. (I overheard people say that he’d just come from working on a movie with one of the lesser Baldwin brothers.) “You really want this, hey?” he asked after I laid the cheese on thick, which made me feel both encouraged and ashamed. My third audition was in front of the McCain Foods board, who had flown in from Halifax to make the final decision. They seemed pleased, but it was lunch hour and most were tucking into sandwiches. (The catering got better at each subsequent audition.)

I wasn’t informed I had the part until getting a call at 8 p.m. Go to the Currie Barracks parking lot at 3 a.m., I was told. The barbecue in the commercial was supposed to be taking place at sunset, but for our purposes sunrise could masquerade as sunset, giving us two chances to film the spot in one day.

The amount of equipment and size of the crew on location was ridiculous for a one-minute ad, I thought, knowing how excited my filmmaker friends would be to have such resources for one day. We filmed the courtship scenes dozens of times, from all angles, but I wasn’t allowed to eat the pizza because it had red pepper on it which could get caught in my teeth. All the other actors and extras were told to take bites out of their slices during each take, to chew and nod like they were enjoying it. Pizza with a barbecue sauce base doesn’t taste right at 6 a.m. – one of the girls had to purge behind the barn. The pizzas were replaced when the cheese hardened and started to sweat, usually every other take. Two women doctored the frozen pies by adding freshly cooked green and red pepper and pieces of white chicken breast. One of the ladies at the table said she was so sick of the song, she wanted to smash my guitar, like in that Juicy Fruit commercial.

At 3:30 p.m., the director was calling for the last shot, and by 3:45 p.m. the skies unleashed one hell of a wind and rain storm. As the crew scrambled to cover their gear, I had to go into a barn with the sound guy to record the song another dozen times. Most of the actors had done a number of commercials before and said this was an unusually smooth shoot. “You’re a principal,” I was told over and over. “You’ll get a whack of cash for this.” I shook off the hat head and waited for the royalty cheques to roll in.

A couple of months later, when the commercial first aired, my e-mail inbox was full of “Is that you?” notes.

Corb Lund saw the commercial and he told a mutual friend of ours, “I would never do that.” And of course he shouldn’t. Corb is a cowboy. A real cowboy might seriously damage his stature as a country music artist were he seen dressed up as a Hollywood cowboy, hawking pizza. I, on the other hand, do not play country music and am not a cowboy, therefore my career as a singer/songwriter and my stint as the Pizza Cowboy do not conflict. Very often.

At one of my shows not long after the spot started airing, a nearly hysterical woman and her sister approached me. They had seen the commercial and discovered my true identity. They asked me to please, please, please play “Yellow Rose of Texas.” They were disappointed it wasn’t on any of my CDs. They were at a Kris Demeanor show, but all they wanted was the Pizza Cowboy.

In Grade 8, I joined an extracurricular social studies club called Project Business, designed to help young people learn about supply and demand economics. I signed up because Krista Copper was in it. She had brown feathered hair, eyes like a stunned deer, and wore a corduroy jacket buttoned right up to her chin, which gave her a look of impenetrability that I found alluring. We were to make peanut brittle and sell it at lunch hour, calculating the cost of the peanuts, sugar, molasses and labour time, and fixing a price that would recoup our costs or, even better, make a profit.

The club was divided into three competing groups. I made sure I was in Krista’s, and she set the strategy. The key, she said, was the quality of our peanut brittle. Her mom’s was awesome, so she’d get her mom to make it. We would charge the same price as everyone else, but ours would be better, so we’d sell more. Ours was indeed better, and we did sell more. We made more money, but we used twice as many peanuts, which were the most expensive ingredient. Our expenses were nearly double those of the other groups, and we made less money than everybody else. Krista was demoted from club president to treasurer and I joined flag football.

From a slave to ulterior motives to a career in the performing arts, I’ve spent the past 10 years cobbling together a viable existence by writing, performing and recording original music as Kris Demeanor, often with my Crack Band. Sure, under the auspices of making a respectable living, I have made halfhearted stabs at biology, architecture, horticulture, English literature, but none stirred in me a sustainable passion. Many people love music, and love to play it, but playing professionally requires a type of enthusiasm akin to mild but unrelenting panic. I liken it to navigating through the maze of mirrors at the Stampede as a child. It was confusing, frustrating, and everywhere was me. I would bash into the glass and cry, but suppress my sobs and get it together so dad wouldn’t have to rescue me. I’d go in again the next year.

Life as a touring musician is one of thrilling variety and profound uncertainty. I have been involved in theatre, film, public education, television and spoken word, putting as many fingers into as many pies as I can without feeling like a cheap huckster. Most artists, in their early years, and often throughout their careers, need “real” jobs to supplement their grand ideas. By real, I mean any job with a defined payment structure, with shifts of a set time frame. When the Crack Band and I play to drunken snowboarders at the Rose and Crown in Banff for $300 and nobody listens until an insufferably insistent guy crashes the stage and plays “American Pie” to grateful screams, we call it a paid rehearsal, a punch-the-clock gig. Sometimes, a great gig pays good money; it doesn’t feel like a real job when you’re backstage at a folk festival chatting with Bruce Cockburn in the port-a-let lineup.

Usually, though, it’s difficult to quantify where art meets making a living, or what is a satisfying experience as opposed to a perversely interesting one. Creating quality art sucks time and energy, and it takes years for the monetary payoff to come close to equaling the time and personal resources spent realizing the vision. An artist’s ongoing internal debate bats around many questions: How much do I need in order to live comfortably? Will CD sales and live shows pay the bills? Should I focus on publishing and write a cookie-cutter country hit? Learn a bunch of Neil Diamond songs and do corporate parties? If I do these things, am I still an artist? Who cares? Where is the romance in being an artist of unwavering integrity when Alberta Health sends the collection agency after you? Do I party because I’m a musician or did I become a musician because I like to party?

Most musicians I know are in a perpetual state of unease, continually revisiting these questions and revising our answers, knowing that we’ll be asked, at family parties, by old friends at bars, and by other artists, “So, can you survive doing just music?” We all want to look at them squarely and say, “Yes, that is all I do. I live humbly by some standards, but I stand before you, clearly surviving.”

Many artists have colourful “real job” histories, though not because they have a lot of interests. They love their art, and secondary loves such as cooking and bird watching don’t make any money. An artist’s catalogue of real jobs is unique because they take whatever outside work they can, only when they absolutely have to or when it’s convenient, jobs with flexible schedules, jobs devoid of deep responsibility.

By global standards, of course, we enjoy lives of ridiculous comfort and wealth (understanding this helps us through the droughts).

And, like every successful business, we’re helped by the supportive “teams” we’ve compiled: encouraging parents and spouses, understanding bandmates, the odd fan-turned-patron, a friend with some industry clout, the Canada Council. Still, it’s a tenuous existence, because not only are we trying to create decent art, we are also trying to invent our own job niches. The dangerous thing about saying goodbye to real jobs is that the more time passes without one, the more impossible it is to imagine ever getting one again. But then, the most dangerous animals are the hungriest.

Let me regress.

Sweat runs down my face. Drops sting my eyes, which are half-blinded by the glare of stage lights. I strain to see people I know in the shadows of this dimly-lit bar: the women’s rugby team our bassist’s girlfriend plays for takes up an entire table, pounding back drinks; our drummer’s tech-head buddies, looking emasculated next to the rugby players; a few friends from the church I attend, completely comfortable despite the fact that our band, Seven Devil Fix, is playing hard rock. Their faith is anonymous here. They’re simply part of the scene, applauding in waves whenever we finish a song. Our own volume is a tsunami by comparison, a roar so loud my ears will ring until I drift off to sleep around 4 a.m., after the final song has been sung, last call announced, and the gear safely stowed in our practice space. Tomorrow night we’ll haul it out again. I’ll set up my amp and plug in my guitar in a very different venue.

Tonight, wine is one of many spirits imbibed, probably the least popular in the type of places Seven Devil Fix plays. Tomorrow, if wine is present, it will be a sacrament of the spirit, consumed in a ritual nearly two millennia old. Tonight I sing for the pleasure of these patrons; tomorrow I will sing for the applause of heaven. In less than 24 hours my feet will touch down in two worlds, and while I’m learning to live with the tension between the secular and the sacred, it hasn’t always been easy.

Music and faith. These have been the two constants of my life, and my work, for as long as I can remember. If it’s true that we practice our future professions through childhood play, then I started sowing these career seeds very early. I made my public debut at age five, singing “Jesus Loves Me” and accompanying myself, bereft of skills, on a plastic toy electric guitar, in front of a small church congregation in Fox Creek, a logging and oil town midway between Edmonton and Peace Country.

I delivered my first sermon that same year, atop a dirt pile in the schoolyard at recess. My family was heavily involved in church work: my father led music, singing “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun,” while my mother taught our Sunday school. We sang in church on Sundays, but we also danced to the Beach Boys and Elvis in our living room. As a child, I sensed no tension between worlds.

When we moved to Medicine Hat and began attending a conservative Baptist church, however, the divide became apparent. At our new church, “Amazing Grace” was not open to modification, and kids didn’t play toy guitars. Baptists are the brunt of many jokes because they consider dancing a sin, so my sister and I stood straight in church and at our youth group. But we also won “crazy dance” competitions at school dances and shoved our way through the crowd to get a better view of Duran Duran and David Bowie at Commonwealth Stadium in 1987.

I wasn’t a hell-raiser or a rebel. I loved my faith. I was raised to believe in a better world, and I do. But I was also drawn to pretty much every ’80s-era Christian anathema. I played Dungeons & Dragons, devoured Conan The Barbarian paperbacks, followed my love of myth and legend to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (which wasn’t yet in vogue for Christians), and by my late teens started to play – gasp! – heavy metal. I grew my hair long, traded Roots sweatshirts for T-shirts adorned with skulls, and doctored my jeans with sandpaper and bleach.

“Mike,” one venerable church usher asked, “when are you going to start dressing like a Christian?”

Just as I started gearing up to become a rock star, I came under the mentoring guidance of an associate pastor named Craig Ginn. Associate pastors are often in charge of a church’s younger congregants, but Craig was like no pastor I’d met before. His long black hair, faded jeans and leather jacket were more John Cougar than John Wesley. He sang U2 and Bob Dylan tunes in his sermons, and performed in bars to support his first indie release (which the backup singers for – again, gasp! – Bon Jovi had sang on).

Until then, I’d been waffling on what to do after I finished high school. I wanted to do something artistic and was basking in the popularity that came with being the lead singer of one of Medicine Hat’s few live rock acts. But 18 years of Protestant guilt therapy was telling me to use my talent “for the Lord.” Until meeting Craig, I thought I’d have to choose one of two paths. Instead, I decided to pursue dual careers: pastor and rock star.

If I knew how complicated my life would become, I would have quit my band and become a teacher, just like my father had advised. But I was stubborn, young and idealistic. Once I had a degree from a theological school, I figured, my ideas about rock music in the church would be respected, accepted and implemented. So I moved to Edmonton and, during the day, attended classes at North American Baptist College. At night, I was either rehearsing or playing in clubs around the city in a metal band called Athan Asia.

Christian rock in Alberta was still in its infancy. Christians were just starting to ask why the devil should get all the good music, so in addition to clubs, Athan Asia played churches. Yet for our efforts, we were accused of myriad infractions: our music couldn’t be “Christian” because it was too loud and the lyrics unintelligible; we encouraged dancing; one elder denounced our stage backdrop, painted to look like a brick wall, as “Satan’s cloth”; we saw countless frowns and demonstrative walk-outs; we were denied payment for a set and told, “If Jesus walked by the church and saw what was going on, he would have walked right on by.”

At one Christian music festival, a country artist sat us down and enlightened us that his God was the God of the “quiet stream and the rippling brook.” I remember thinking that he’d never read the part in the Bible about the walls of Jericho falling down.

Jennifer Abel and Dawn Loucks have what might be described as a very expensive hobby. By day, Loucks is a computer programmer in the oil and gas biz and Abel teaches at Mount Royal College and the U of C. By night, they run Calgary-based Saved by Radio (savedbyradio.com), an independent record label that produces bands such as Old Reliable and AA Sound System – and they pay for many of the releases out of their own pockets. Why put themselves on the line? Call it an after-life crisis. Abel explains.

How did you two meet?
We met at Calgary’s campus radio station, CJSW, in 2002. Because I had just been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is the same kind of cancer that Joey Ramone had, our program director decided that I should hook up with this other volunteer, Dawn, who had had Hodgkin’s lymphoma a couple years before. That’s the reason we’re Saved By Radio. Music was very helpful to both of us in the process of treatment and then dealing with life afterwards. Once you’ve gone through it and you’re still alive, you have to reorganize the way you think about your life. That’s part of the reason why we’re willing to do these crazy things like start a record label and put things out on vinyl and take chances on independent musicians, some of whom have never put out a record before.

How did you get started in the record business?
In 2003, Dawn had this crazy idea that she wanted to put together a compilation of Calgary bands covering Stompin’ Tom Connors songs. From there, we started meeting these bands. A lot of them would say, “We’ve got these recordings but we have no way to put them out.” So as this need started becoming more and more evident, we thought, well, why not? That was when it became a label rather than just a one-off project.

How do you choose the bands you represent?
There has to be something honest and passionate about them. They have to be into what they’re doing. I think most of them are going to be doing it regardless as to whether they’re going to make any money at it or not. So they’re driven in that way. Actually, that was how we got hooked up with Old Reliable, because the singer, Mark Davis, did a record about his girlfriend dying of breast cancer, The Gradual Moment. We thought we should get together with them. Turns out they didn’t have a label.

How are you dealing with the music piracy issue that has hurt the record industry?
One thing that we’ve started doing in the past year is putting out actual vinyl LPs. I mean, the CD is lovely, but vinyl just has something alluring about it. It’s a lot of fun and is really undergoing a resurgence. But what you also do is put in a download code. So you buy the vinyl, you get the beautiful sleeve, you get the album itself, then you go to one of the downloading sites and enter their download code and get all the electronic files. That’s included in the price you pay.

Do you mind that the label doesn’t always turn a profit?
For the moment, it would be great if we could break even, but we’re not going to stop doing it just because we’re putting money into it. There is a lot of good coming out of it in terms of what’s happening for the artists. But some days, when you’re stuffing envelopes, it doesn’t feel all that altruistic. Before we started having envelope-stuffing parties when we were doing mail-outs, I was sitting at my kitchen table in my pajamas stuffing envelopes going, “Yes, this is the life of an indie record label.” If we ever win a Juno award, I’ll be sure to bring that up.