Posted on 25 March 2011

You may or may not know that in Canada, we have rules about the amount of Canadian content (including music) that has to be played on terrestrial radio. With the huge number of quality musicians coming out of Canada these days, I’m always surprised when I run across someone who thinks that this is a difficult thing to do. Of course, this is generally an older person. People younger than me have no problem with it. None of the DJs I’ve trained at CFUR have an issue.  If they are indie inclined, they have no shortage of bands. Rap and dub have to it a little bit more consciously, but still manage to find a large catalogue of work with with just a small amount of digging. Even the one or two people who were more likely to listen to commercial radio thought nothing of finding Canadian artists, so it’s not like this stuff is limited to the underground.
I’m putting together my radio show for this week. All I’m doing is choosing my favourite songs that I listened to over the past week. I have rock, experimental, bass, and rap. Every single one of my songs is Canadian. Most of them were released in the last month, all were released in the last few years.
I didn’t do this on purpose. It’s just what I’ve been listening to and enjoying this week. It made me realize that I could see getting rid of these CanCon rules in a few years. Not because everyone will realize how unfair and unreasonable they are. They’ll get rid of them because the sorts of people who are volunteering in campus radio now will have taken over the industry. And they won’t see the point of having rules to enforce something everyone does naturally anyways.

Filed under: music