Shannon Murray Mead, right, with her mother Susan Murray and her son Luke Mead in Raven Street Studios, the Ottawa recording facility her father founded in 1992.Dave Chan
In Ottawa’s music community, Shannon Murray Mead is known as the steady hand behind Raven Street Studios, a recording space that has shaped generations of creatives. But becoming the studio’s owner and president wasn’t always her plan.
Ms. Murray Mead’s father, Robert “Breen” Murray, founded the business in 1992 after a career in radio and television. He paired the studio with a school, The Audio Recording Academy (TARA), offering students hands-on training inside a professional recording environment.
He built the 3,500-square-foot studio from scratch. The early years were financially precarious, a risk Mr. Murray’s wife Susan felt keenly. “I can remember saying, ‘There goes my white picket fence,’” she jokes.
With no money to hire staff, Raven Street was at first a family operation by necessity. Ms. Murray Mead quips that she and her brother were “volun-told” to help their father. In her early 20s, while studying television broadcasting at Algonquin College, she answered phones for the studio, sent advertising postcards and spread the word, pre-internet, to high schools, record labels and musicians across the city.
“It was such a niche business, but it was exciting,” Ms. Murray Mead says.
Still, neither she nor her brother expected to stay in the family business forever and Mr. Murray – no stranger to following new opportunities – supported them in finding their own paths.
Both children moved to Vancouver to work in music and television production. Her brother stayed out west while Ms. Murray Mead later migrated to Toronto to launch a TARA chapter that she ran for more than a decade.
The absence of familial obligation is what gives family-run music businesses their best chance at surviving succession, says Tara Shannon, executive director of the Ottawa Festival Network, who coaches music organizations. Success in the industry is itself a feat, so having the next generation genuinely excited to take over is a “freaking miracle and something that needs to be celebrated,” she says.
“People who are in the music business are in it because they love it.”
Over the years, Mr. Murray experienced progressive hearing loss that his family attributes to prolonged construction noise while the studio was being built. By his mid-60s, he could no longer hear well enough to run the business and told his daughter in 2009 that the studio was hers if she wanted it.
The timing felt right: Ms. Murray Mead would be returning to Ottawa from Toronto with plenty of experience under her belt and her two sons would grow up near their grandparents.
Her father stayed close during the transition, stopping by for coffee and offering guidance, but never questioned her leadership. He was ready to “just go fishing,” his wife says.
The hand-off was emotional for Ms. Murray Mead, who felt the weight of being solely responsible for the studio. On her first night closing up shop alone, she found herself stumped by a light switch, unable to find the “off” button; her father had wired it to be separate from the central lighting panel and had positioned it in an obscure location. “That triggered some tears,” she says. “Time had marched on and, all of a sudden, I was in charge.”
But Ms. Murray Mead learned resilience and decisiveness from her father, who passed away in 2021 at age 78, which enabled her to build up Raven Street while keeping it a haven for creatives, from fresh-faced students to seasoned pros. The studio has welcomed a roll call of artists and public figures such as singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne, rapper Snoop Dogg, Josh Homme of the band Queens of the Stone Age and actress Dakota Fanning.
Today, a little more than half the business is tied to the academy. The remainder is split between music recording and postproduction work including film, television and music-video projects, and audiobooks for major publishers including Penguin Random House.
Raven Street’s longevity reflects broader signs of recovery across Canada’s music industry. According to Statistics Canada, the country’s record production and distribution category earned $903.3-million in operating revenue in 2023, up more than 20 per cent since 2021. While sound-recording studios were among the hardest hit during the pandemic, revenues have rebounded, rising 10.2 per cent to $169-million in the same period.
For a studio built on in-person connection, COVID-19 was especially threatening to Raven Street. “I thought it might be the end of the business,” Ms. Murray Mead says. But she turned the facility into a hub for musicians since its generous size allowed for live-streaming performances during isolation orders when space was scarce.
Her biggest measure of success is sustaining the “long line of community” her father began by always keeping in sight the foundation he laid: respect the work and the client, she says.
The question of family succession hovers again as Ms. Murray Mead’s sons enter adulthood. While retirement is still far off, Ms. Murray Mead, 54, acknowledges that her kids may want to shake things up one day. Her older son Luke Mead, 18, is studying commerce at Dalhousie University with an eye on how his new skills might one day serve Raven Street. Although he’s never been pressured to take over the business, he’s already hatching advertising plans to help attract clients.
However, Mr. Mead says there are “amazing people” among the studio’s staff of six who can “fill those shoes” if neither he nor his younger brother Jack, 17, choose to join the family enterprise.
Mr. Murray, who took particular joy in his grandsons, “would be so happy to think that now Luke or Jack would be running the business that he started,” his wife Ms. Murray says.
Ms. Murray Mead keeps a sign on her desk that reads: “What would Breen Murray do?” It’s a question that is sure to guide Raven Street well into the future, no matter who takes it on after her.
Have a suggestion of a Canadian multigenerational family business for this regular series? E-mail smallbiz@globeandmail.com.