Graeme Boyce

Graeme Anthony Boyce (born 1960) is a writer and lives in Toronto today. In 2003 he was voted onto Showbiz Canada's Wall of Fame, and nominated in 1997 for Canada's Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He has recently written a script for a new movie called "Columbus Had a Map", and is keenly interested in the hunt to find evidence of lost civilizations which existed before the global catastrophe approximately 12,000 years ago that also ended the Ice Age rather abruptly.

He graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University in 1981 degreed in economics and history, though worked at the Holiday Inn across from the Pearson Airport before accepting a management position at the Elbow Beach Hotel and Resort in Bermuda. He stayed on the island, completely enjoying the experience, for two years before returning to Toronto. Although the transition (from pink beaches and rum swizzles to closed beaches and real beer) was smooth in hindsight, it took him several months before landing a job with "RPM", a trade magazine for the music industry.

Boyce accepted a position as a national news editor and remained with the magazine for four years, interviewing not only leading artists of the day - from Anne Murray and Iron Maiden to Janet Jackson and The Cure - and all up and comers, but also their managers and handlers, as well as broadcasters, retailers and marketers. He left the company in 1989, and shortly thereafter put "theory into practice" by launching Raw Energy Records, which was the same year his first son, Eric, was born.

Over the next ten years, the independent record label emerged under his tutelage as an identifiable brand of entertainment, releasing and promoting over fifty titles, while also producing shows, festivals and tours featuring many various popular bands. Raw Energy targeted a unified generation of skate, snow and wakeboarders throughout the decade and successfully reached this youthful demographic on the emerging Internet as well. In 1997 Raw Energy began to broadcast a weekly radio show the VCBN (Virtually Canadian Broadcast Network) which featured music and live interviews. It quickly grew the label's audience globally.

The station manager and founder, John Walters, recognized the opportunity to develop many more similar audio packages online - competing with terrestrial radio stations for audience - and shortly thereafter in 1998 hired Boyce as Marketing Director. Boyce was instrumental in transforming the company from a private venture to a public offering. VCBN became Iceberg Radio. Shares were bought, sold and traded and eventually the company ended up being owned outright by Standard Broadcasting in Canada. Walters and Boyce were approached by a lawyer, David Thring, to supply similar services to another company called Magicorp who were busy preparing another integrated offering, TribeNation, in 2000.