Title: Founder & Director
Email: ryder@robertwilliston.com
I began the Canadian Music Discovery Project in 1988 with a single goal: to document, preserve, and celebrate Canada’s musical heritage before it could be forgotten. What started as a personal cataloging effort built from my private record collection has grown into an archive of more than 130,000 Canadian music artifacts — one of the largest private music collections in the country.
From 1990 to 1992, I hosted The Peaking Canuck Show on CiTR in Vancouver, trained by the legendary Human Serviette. The show blended all-Canadian music with archival Canadian audio — a format I called Canadiana Mixing — weaving historical context into the music in a way that shaped the philosophy behind this project.
In 2009–10, I published over 200 Canadian artist discographies on ItCameFromCanada.com, followed by the reissue of rare and long-lost Canadian recordings in 2010–11 from artists such as Artok, Borealis, Dr. Philter Banx, Folklords, Neil Merryweather, and many others.
Today, that early work has evolved into The Museum of Canadian Music (CitizenFreak.com) — a living archive with 5,000+ artists and over 1,000,000 digitized recordings, many available nowhere else. What began as passion archiving has become a national cultural resource, now SOCAN-compliant and expanding into a global platform for music preservation, artist empowerment, and discovery.
This work has always been collaborative. It is strengthened every day by musicians, collectors, researchers, and music lovers who share a belief in preserving our cultural history. I am humbled by the support, inspired by the stories, and committed to continuing this work — one record, one page, and one forgotten gem at a time.
The journey continues, and the best chapters are still ahead.
-Robert Williston
Founder, Museum of Canadian Music
CitizenFreak.com
Title: Key Contributor
Email: 29musicman@gmail.com
Greg’s behind-the-scenes contributions help make The Museum of Canadian Music and CitizenFreak.com a richer experience for everyone who visits. His dedication, generosity, and genuine passion for Canadian music have become an invaluable part of the archive’s continued growth.
Greg grew up in Toronto in a household where music and broadcasting were part of everyday life. He remembers his parents tuning in to CBC Radio for programming, music, and the Saturday opera broadcasts, and before long he had his own transistor radio, listening closely to 1050 CHUM-AM—whose studios were only a short walk north on Yonge Street.
That early fascination with radio led him into broadcasting. While attending Glendon College in Toronto, Greg became a broadcaster and Music Director at CKRG-FM Radio Glendon, later earning certification through Humber College as a broadcaster. Although broadcasting did not ultimately become his long-term career, the experience deepened a lifelong connection to music and sound.
Over the years, Greg became a passionate collector across nearly every format imaginable, from 78 rpm records and 45s to LPs, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s. In more recent years, he has focused his collecting more deeply on the many forms and eras of Canadian music, bringing that same enthusiasm and knowledge to his ongoing work with The Museum of Canadian Music.