CREDIT: HANNAH THEODORE
Students from the MIA program are hard at work promoting the annual Share the Land concert, set to take place Feb. 25.

Students in the second year of Fanshawe College’s music industry arts (MIA) program are working hard to put on a big show for the 2023 Share the Land concert. The concert is scheduled for Feb. 15 at the London Music Hall with doors opening at 6 p.m. and the show starting at 7 p.m.

This year’s concert features over 26 talented artists from MIA, playing covers of classic and modern Canadian hits. The show is practically planned from the beginning of each school year.

“The event is part of the artists development class for second year students and that is evolved from the first-year artists development class,” explained Erica Charles, one of the general managers for Share the Land 2023.


“Our entire Monday afternoons, as part of the course, are dedicated to rehearsing for Share the Land. When the first term of second year comes around we start to find artists that are interested in performing and we start to hone and develop their talents throughout the year. Then if they do have an interest in performing at Share the Land, we make sure that a Canadian song is part of the repertoire”

The biggest difference this year is that first-year students are more involved than in the past two years, leading to more collaboration between students in different years of the program.

“The previous year I believe that the whole program, or almost the whole program, was online, so we didn’t get in touch with them at all. It was super hard to get in touch with them,” said Andre Brienza, a marketing director for Share the Land 2023.

Share the Land is a uniquely London event, run almost entirely by students in the MIA and audio post-production (APP) programs at Fanshawe College. The idea for the concert came about from MIA Professor Mike Roth’s artist development classes when deliberating how to get student performance experience.

“How could we get in front of a bigger audience?” Roth asked his students in a lecture. A student in the class suggested a charity show. “Well, if MIA wanted to put on a charity show, what could we do the charity for? And what could be our, you know, vision for the show?”

Then another student named Adam Barnes put his hand up and suggested having the show pay tribute and honour the late Jack Richardson, a Canadian record producer and former MIA professor who had died the year prior. Jack Richardson had an enormous influence on the Canadian music industry, according to Roth.

“The producer who started the Canadian music industry with Guess Who and the biggest [music] studio in Canada. It’s been said that he was the big bang of Canadian music. He started it. And he was a professor here for many years too.”

The concert has been an amazing success story for Fanshawe and the MIA program.

“[I’m] very proud,” Roth said. “Obviously it’s been a real challenge, but every year, the students really come up big and deliver on the night of the show the best performance they’ve ever done, and that’s very gratifying. It’s been a cornerstone of our program every year because students come back and they want to see how it’s going…but also, it encompasses all the elements of the music industry in a practical exercise.”

Tickets can be purchased online at ticketweb.ca and cost just under $30.