F Eh Q: Do Canadian Radio Stations Legally Have To Play Bryan Adams?
Dear Plaidspin,
Is it true there's a law that Canadian radio stations have to play a certain amount of Canadian music? The ****?
-Steve
Dear Steve,
Oh no, no no no. "Steve"? That just doesn't fit our elaborate Dear Abby-style sign-offs we've had in our fake letters so far. How about,
Dear Steve Canadian Content Confusion in Cleveland,
Great question, CCCiC.
Let's start with a bit of an oddball anecdote. In the early 1970s, Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray and The Guess Who once held a joint press conference in Toronto with a peculiar request: they wanted Canadian radio to stop playing their songs.
What would compel these successful Canadian artists at the height of their popularity to ask their nation's radio stations to actively shun them? Well, the reason involves something called the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's Broadcasting Act of 1968, better known as Canadian Content guidelines - or, more colloquially, CanCon laws.
As some people might know - and, if you don't know, this is another one of those secretly embarrassing Canadian factoids we try not to advertise to the world - Canada has protectionist media guidelines written into our laws that ensure a certain amount of Canadian-made music and TV shows get broadcast by Canadian radio and TV stations.
It might sound like the kind of law you'd hear from some backwards tinpot dictatorship - here in the Kajiristan Republic, our Eternal Leader ensures we only listen to pure Kajiristani music, not the indulgent music of the American pigdogs - but it's true. To this very day, Canadian radio stations must play anywhere from 25% to 40% Canadian music, depending on their license type. This is enforced by the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the American FCC), and stations can be fined, or even shut down, for refusing to play the mandated Canadian quota. That means classic rock radio playlists that are heavy on Rush and The Guess Who, pop stations spinning Bieber and Avril Lavigne in heavy rotation, and hip-hop stations playing a lot - a lot - of Drake.
(CanCon laws as they apply to TV are interesting in their own right - after all, they've led to a few notable success stories, like SCTV, Kids In The Hall, and Trailer Park Boys. They've also been responsible for propping up a lot of not-so-great shows, like... well, take your pick. But for our scope, let's just talk about music today.)
Back to our friends Gord Lightfoot, Anne Murray and The Guess Who: the reason they were asking Canadian radio stations not to play their records was that, in the nascent days of CanCon laws, there simply wasn't a lot of Canadian music out there. That's one of the reasons the law was established: to build the Canadian music industry from the ground up, by brute-force radio repetition if necessary. The problem was, with radio stations across the country forced to play 25% Canadian music (the quota has since gone up, hitting 30% in the 1980s and 35% in the 1990s, with some newer radio licenses being as high as 40% CanCon), these few existing Canadian artists were getting overplayed to the point of exhaustion. Artists usually love having their songs in heavy rotation, but with radio stations playing a steady diet of CanCon standbys like Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind", Murray's "Snowbird" and the Guess Who's "American Woman" practically every hour on the hour, fans were getting sick of their favourite Canadian artists and were begging radio stations to play anyone else.
Luckily, that meant station directors were forced to play undiscovered Canadian talent to mix up their playlists, which, from that 1970-era vacuum, essentially created the Canadian music industry. The demand led to Canadian recording studios and labels popping up overnight. And that led to bands, and that led to hits - and, by the 80s and 90s, the Canadian music industry had become so robust that many of the biggest music stars in the world were Canadian. Today, it's not out-of-the-ordinary for the US Billboard charts to be absolutely littered with Canadian songs. (For the inevitable wiseass who's just going to skim this article and then post a comment about how Justin Bieber sucks, here's your preemptive "haha, good one, Jay ****ing Leno.")
Now, what I'm about to say may be a bit of an unfair characterization - after all, Canada has a rich history of music going back to confederation, including plenty of folk standards, country, and other types of bearded men singing songs about how blue the sky looks - but from a mainstream radio perspective, before 1965 or so, Canadian music was a complete wasteland. Radio stations played almost exclusively American and British hits, save for a few AM Gold oldies from Ottawa's own Paul Anka.
By the time the late 60s rolled around, though, Canada was gradually becoming comfortable in its own burgeoning cultural identity.
Bolstered by the excitement around Expo '67 in Montreal, the election of young populist Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1968, and a new generation of baby-boomers coming of age, the great doors of Canadian Culture (once exclusively the domain of stodgy National Film Board documentaries and watercolour paintings of pine trees) were starting to swing open to a new generation of musicians, actors and visual artists. For musicians specifically, like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell coming out of Toronto's fledgling folk scene, career options at home were limited. The only way to make it big for a successful Canadian artist in the 60s would be by moving to New York or LA - there was just nothing to support them at home.
Today, musicians can not only thrive, but have successful careers entirely within Canada. For every story of an Arcade Fire, a Metric, a Broken Social Scene or a Tegan & Sara successfully cracking the US market, there are bands like The Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo and Great Big Sea who've carved out long and successful careers exclusively in Canada without ever moving the dial south of the border. In a way, those are the real CanCon success stories: not the bands who used Canadian radio as a springboard to world fame, but the ones who can now grind out a career entirely within Canada - a dream that, pre-1970, would have been impossible.
More:F Eh Q: Do Canadian Radio Stations Legally Have To Play Bryan Adams?
So, if mandating the radio play of Canadian artists is what caused the music industry to grow by leaps and bounds in Canada, then logically if they mandate playing quality music regardless of the birth place of the artist, we should see an increase in quality, no? Maybe not, but can we just please, please, please stop playing Bryan Adams. Nobody wants to hear that.
Dear Plaidspin,
Is it true there's a law that Canadian radio stations have to play a certain amount of Canadian music? The ****?
-Steve
Dear Steve,
Oh no, no no no. "Steve"? That just doesn't fit our elaborate Dear Abby-style sign-offs we've had in our fake letters so far. How about,
Dear Steve Canadian Content Confusion in Cleveland,
Great question, CCCiC.
Let's start with a bit of an oddball anecdote. In the early 1970s, Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray and The Guess Who once held a joint press conference in Toronto with a peculiar request: they wanted Canadian radio to stop playing their songs.
What would compel these successful Canadian artists at the height of their popularity to ask their nation's radio stations to actively shun them? Well, the reason involves something called the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's Broadcasting Act of 1968, better known as Canadian Content guidelines - or, more colloquially, CanCon laws.
As some people might know - and, if you don't know, this is another one of those secretly embarrassing Canadian factoids we try not to advertise to the world - Canada has protectionist media guidelines written into our laws that ensure a certain amount of Canadian-made music and TV shows get broadcast by Canadian radio and TV stations.
It might sound like the kind of law you'd hear from some backwards tinpot dictatorship - here in the Kajiristan Republic, our Eternal Leader ensures we only listen to pure Kajiristani music, not the indulgent music of the American pigdogs - but it's true. To this very day, Canadian radio stations must play anywhere from 25% to 40% Canadian music, depending on their license type. This is enforced by the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the American FCC), and stations can be fined, or even shut down, for refusing to play the mandated Canadian quota. That means classic rock radio playlists that are heavy on Rush and The Guess Who, pop stations spinning Bieber and Avril Lavigne in heavy rotation, and hip-hop stations playing a lot - a lot - of Drake.
(CanCon laws as they apply to TV are interesting in their own right - after all, they've led to a few notable success stories, like SCTV, Kids In The Hall, and Trailer Park Boys. They've also been responsible for propping up a lot of not-so-great shows, like... well, take your pick. But for our scope, let's just talk about music today.)
Back to our friends Gord Lightfoot, Anne Murray and The Guess Who: the reason they were asking Canadian radio stations not to play their records was that, in the nascent days of CanCon laws, there simply wasn't a lot of Canadian music out there. That's one of the reasons the law was established: to build the Canadian music industry from the ground up, by brute-force radio repetition if necessary. The problem was, with radio stations across the country forced to play 25% Canadian music (the quota has since gone up, hitting 30% in the 1980s and 35% in the 1990s, with some newer radio licenses being as high as 40% CanCon), these few existing Canadian artists were getting overplayed to the point of exhaustion. Artists usually love having their songs in heavy rotation, but with radio stations playing a steady diet of CanCon standbys like Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind", Murray's "Snowbird" and the Guess Who's "American Woman" practically every hour on the hour, fans were getting sick of their favourite Canadian artists and were begging radio stations to play anyone else.
Luckily, that meant station directors were forced to play undiscovered Canadian talent to mix up their playlists, which, from that 1970-era vacuum, essentially created the Canadian music industry. The demand led to Canadian recording studios and labels popping up overnight. And that led to bands, and that led to hits - and, by the 80s and 90s, the Canadian music industry had become so robust that many of the biggest music stars in the world were Canadian. Today, it's not out-of-the-ordinary for the US Billboard charts to be absolutely littered with Canadian songs. (For the inevitable wiseass who's just going to skim this article and then post a comment about how Justin Bieber sucks, here's your preemptive "haha, good one, Jay ****ing Leno.")
Now, what I'm about to say may be a bit of an unfair characterization - after all, Canada has a rich history of music going back to confederation, including plenty of folk standards, country, and other types of bearded men singing songs about how blue the sky looks - but from a mainstream radio perspective, before 1965 or so, Canadian music was a complete wasteland. Radio stations played almost exclusively American and British hits, save for a few AM Gold oldies from Ottawa's own Paul Anka.
By the time the late 60s rolled around, though, Canada was gradually becoming comfortable in its own burgeoning cultural identity.
Bolstered by the excitement around Expo '67 in Montreal, the election of young populist Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1968, and a new generation of baby-boomers coming of age, the great doors of Canadian Culture (once exclusively the domain of stodgy National Film Board documentaries and watercolour paintings of pine trees) were starting to swing open to a new generation of musicians, actors and visual artists. For musicians specifically, like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell coming out of Toronto's fledgling folk scene, career options at home were limited. The only way to make it big for a successful Canadian artist in the 60s would be by moving to New York or LA - there was just nothing to support them at home.
Today, musicians can not only thrive, but have successful careers entirely within Canada. For every story of an Arcade Fire, a Metric, a Broken Social Scene or a Tegan & Sara successfully cracking the US market, there are bands like The Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo and Great Big Sea who've carved out long and successful careers exclusively in Canada without ever moving the dial south of the border. In a way, those are the real CanCon success stories: not the bands who used Canadian radio as a springboard to world fame, but the ones who can now grind out a career entirely within Canada - a dream that, pre-1970, would have been impossible.
More:F Eh Q: Do Canadian Radio Stations Legally Have To Play Bryan Adams?
So, if mandating the radio play of Canadian artists is what caused the music industry to grow by leaps and bounds in Canada, then logically if they mandate playing quality music regardless of the birth place of the artist, we should see an increase in quality, no? Maybe not, but can we just please, please, please stop playing Bryan Adams. Nobody wants to hear that.
