By Timothy King (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

New FM airwaves lack distinct Canadian sound—and that’s a good thing

By the time you read this, the newest entry into Toronto’s FM radio marketplace will be running at full power, armed with a signal boost obtained in November, two months after its launch.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the owners of Indie88 are making their big bet on radio. On-demand subscription services have emerged to challenge mp3 downloads as the music delivery method of the future, but radio remains popular in the present. According to CRTC’s latest annual report, the average Canadian listens to 17.5 hours of radio per week.

Radio also remains the most popular means of music discovery, according to Nielsen, which found that 61 percent of Canadian consumers rely on terrestrial radio for finding something new to love.

For Canadian artists, the coming of Indie88 has to be considered good news. For one thing, the CRTC made it a condition of Indie88’s licence that it must contribute $2-million over seven years to the development of Canadian content, over and above the small percentage of revenue the Broadcasting Act requires any licensee to contribute.

And of course, Indie88 is subject to those infamous Canadian content requirements, also known as CanCon. This means 40 percent of the music the station plays must be Canadian, of which 60 percent must meet the CRTC’s idea of emerging Canadian artists (a lengthy definition based on how much chart success an artist has gained).

The infamy associated with CanCon most commonly stems from the debate over whether the requirements favour foreign broadcasters, most of them broadcasting online, who don’t need CRTC approval to be heard by Canadians. CRTC-regulated broadcasters complain that CanCon requirements restrict their ability to deliver more popular music to their listeners, costing them audience and ad revenue. Every so often, they attempt to get those requirements reduced to a lower threshold than the usual 35 percent.

It’s an argument with no merit from any perspective aside from the profit motive. But Canadian content requirements need to be re-examined nevertheless. Yes, the rules still play an important role in helping artists to break out on the scene, to be heard amid a foreign-dominated landscape and to succeed financially. (Some of the money broadcasters are required to contribute to help Canadian artists develop is no doubt being used to fill gas tanks on cross-country tours.)

Where CanCon falls down, perhaps as a victim of its own past success, is in its cultural impacts. More than ever before, with Canadians thriving in every possible genre, it’s difficult to identify a distinctly Canadian sound.

This is not a bad thing. Think about today’s music landscape in Canada. Unlike in the 1970s, the first full decade of CanCon requirements, we now have a mature scene full of creative artists who tour internationally, boutique labels with influence and full rosters, and a respected, merit-based annual award called the Polaris prize.

All this in a global context where any given artist’s musical influences are as likely to be from across the Atlantic as down the road. Like musicians from anywhere, Canadians today are making music for the world.

Take Vancouver-based 2013 Polaris nominee Young Galaxy. With a synth-based and sophisticated yet upbeat sound, Young Galaxy’s peers are CHVRCHES, Austra, and Sally Shapiro—only one of whom is Canadian. Young Galaxy’s go-to producer, Dan Lissvik, is a Swede whose band Studio was an inspiration on the last two albums.

With a few exceptions who sing about Canadian-ness explicitly—guys like Joel Plaskett and the Tragically Hip—you’d have a hard time explaining what is Canadian about most of today’s Canadian music.

And yet, like most of us, I’ve been known to fall into the trap of local boosterism when it comes to Canadian musicians. Call it the CBC Music complex. In the absence of anything in the music that might reflect my experience of Canada, I fall back on false pride based on the fact that an emerging artist hails from a place I only know from seeing its name on a map.

There’s no use in pretending, as CanCon requirements encourage us to do, that the Canadian sound is something that can be identified, let alone trumpeted as a part of our culture. By all means, let’s foster a system that supports and promotes emerging Canadian talent in a financially brutal industry. But I prefer to enjoy that music in a global context, which is why I’m more likely to switch the dial to Indie88 over CBC Radio 2 and its unquestioned nationalism.

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it.

That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s regulating stuff. They are, after all, the people known primarily for “CanCon” rules, the quotas that dictate that a certain percentage of programming on Canadian radio and television is made in Canada.

Yet at the time, the Commission’s logic for not touching the web was twofold. First, it felt that the bulk of material online consisted “predominantly of alphanumeric text,” and thus simply wasn’t theirs to regulate; second, it seemed Canadians were both consuming and making lots of Canadian content just fine on their own.

Eleven years later, the internet is a different place. The big change is that, whether on YouTube or the sites of Canadian TV networks, we are watching millions of videos a day. What’s more, we also have unfettered access to TV and film through online services like iTunes, and, since September, streaming video through the U.S.based Netflix. With this sudden online expansion of our entertainment and cultural choices, it may be time for Canada to not only change its approach to regulation, but the entire CanCon concept itself.

Though always contentious, the need for CanCon in our culture’s most dominant medium, TV, has compelling evidence behind it. Except for Hockey Night in Canada, the top 20 most-watched shows in Canada are all made in America. Though there are many reasons why, money is the big one. The pilot episode for ABC’s Lost was widely rumoured to have a budget of around $12 million. That’s as much as or more than many Canadian dramas get for an entire season. The disparity in financial backing—and, consequently, in cultural influence—is often stark. Legitimate debate rages over whether regulation is the best way to solve this gap, but the dominance of American media is likely to increase following the arrival this September of streaming-video service Netflix, allowing users to watch movies and TV shows on their PCs or, with the right equipment, TVs. The growing service already has 15 million subscribers in the U.S., and the company has become so well-known that even Ottawa-based Zip.ca has for years advertised itself as Canada’s Netflix.

But because Netflix delivers content over the web, it’s not subject to any CanCon regulation by the CRTC, and is under no obligation to deliver Canadian content. Similar services from Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are also free to sell and rent whatever they please. Because it’s relatively easy to license Canadian content, and because Canadians will watch it, most services do launch with some Canadian shows and music. But as more and more of these services spring up, Canadians will have increasing access to online broadcast channels untouched by CanCon requirements.

The answer, it would seem, would be to regulate them. When the CRTC initially chose to leave the web alone, it did so because it felt the market was doing an adequate job of protecting Canadian interests. But a decade later, market economics have done what they always do: they created a link between capital and cultural clout, and wealthy American giants like Netflix and Apple will soon have even more influence over what we watch.

What’s more, if media is the fodder for the conversations we have on Facebook and Twitter about the contemporary moment, it’s hard not to talk about those ubiquitous American shows. If you want to chat about body issues, it’s Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks you talk about. The web is a global conversation, and in a world in which U.S. cultural production is everywhere, American culture often becomes our shared reference point.

But even amidst this changing landscape, regulating the web is not the answer. In fact, the cyclical relationship between web hype and pop culture means that regulation is far less effective than relevance. CanCon was effective in a world with a few limited TV channels to choose from; the nearly limitless bandwidth of the web has changed the game.

To become more present in Canadian culture, Canadian media must provide its own fodder for online chatter, links, and debate. What this means is that rather than regulating the delivery system, we need to fund homegrown arts and culture to ensure the internet pipe into every home is filled with high-quality Canadian content.

Forget the free-marketeers’ response that “Canadian media should stand on its own two feet.” We need to acknowledge that the web has expanded our cultural choices well beyond Canadian borders. For Canadians to have and keep our own points of reference that speak to our own issues, we must fund them so that, placed side by side with American or British counterparts, there is no reason to click away.

Fortunately, this path has a precedent. Recent examples from television like Corner Gas and Being Erica prove that when Canadians are given high-quality programming from their own backyards, they will flock to it. In the face of the web and massively expanded competition from across the world, Canada must continue to invest in its own cultural industries if it too wishes to be part of that global conversation.

[Editor’s note: This Magazine columns editor Eva Salinas will be reviewing films and rounding up news about the Toronto International Film Festival over the next week. Visit us online next week for more of her dispatches.]

And so it begins. This year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival kicked-off last night, a little later in the year than usual. By doing so, it opened on the eve of September 11th, a day which many are marking for events not long past. But just a few blocks from Hollywood North, not far from where, already, celeb-gawkers gape, security personnel stand tall and Starbucks baristas break a sweat, Toronto’s Latin American community is commemorating a Sept. 11th many have forgotten — the 1973 military coup in Chile.

I have Chile on the brain, having just returned from the country and regretting that I will miss its public remembrance of lives lost, of rights violated and of expression stifled during Augusto Pinochet’s early reign.

In Toronto, it’s also the start to the Allende Arts Festival, a celebration of everything TIFF won’t be: mostly free, for the people.

During Chile’s coup, the elected Marxist President, Salvador Allende, was ousted and killed. But today, with the country’s first female leader Michelle Bachelet in her last months of presidency, Allende’s spirit is alive; art has been returned to the public.

The streets of Valparaiso, the country’s port city, are splashed with colour: detailed landscapes; romantic poetry; striking designs painted on every house or storefront. Art you can’t buy. Art for everyone.

TIFF may be its exact antithesis (or vice versa). Instead of the nameless painter, it has a famous face. Instead of stray dogs, pampered pets drink filtered water from dishes laid out for them on Yorkville Avenue. Instead of subtlety, extravagance.

I can’t decide whether I find TIFF unappealing simply because it is mostly an elitist event. I’m too young to know it any other way, to remember the “people’s festival.”  I assume, like me, most Torontonians have yet to attend a screening. Once, maybe three, four years ago, I waited in line for two hours, after which I gave up. (And, for context, I am a film lover: a Hot Docs volunteer, an attendee of festivals around the world, from Sudbury to West Africa, etc.)

Quirky Reg Hartt, the cinephile who runs the Cineforum screening series out of his home in Toronto, told community paper The Annex Gleaner last year that the film festival was bad for the city, as people will “save up” their film enthusiasm and spend it on the fest, thus killing business the rest of the year for smaller festival and cinemas.

I’m not convinced. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the upcoming Toronto Palestine Film Festival and Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Film Festival have a bit of trouble drumming up interest in its wake. But as a promoter of the latter told me: “Of course it’s all about TIFF! But we’re the bargain basement alternative to that!” I agree: different vibe, different audience, albeit one less celeb-obsessed and much poorer.

The festival may be for those with the time, commitment and ultimately, the cash (or star power, which supercedes all), but it’s hard not to feel the excitement in the city, even if we don’t make it to Edward Rogers’ backyard party with Bill Clinton and Matt Damon, Steve Nash’s rooftop soiree or bump into Oprah on Ossington (yeah, right).

And TIFF is, after all, a celebration of film (complete with excesses, controversy, promiscuity, and grotesque celeb worship – last year, I drew the line at Paris Hilton’s party.) And it is at home, making sure Canadian content is in front of eyeballs that wouldn’t see it at, say, Venice, Cannes or Sundance. (Alliance Films picked up Rob Stefaniuk’s Suck earlier this week). And, lastly but of note, the festival has made an attempt this year to make it more accessible to the public, with free screenings at Dundas Square.

So, for those indulging in the festival fit for kings, bon appeTIFF!

If the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. gets its way, the province’s libraries will be making a major acquisition this summer without gaining any weight. The association’s Best of B.C. Books Online project plans to purchase electronic rights to a collection of some 1,000 non-fiction titles from British Columbia publishers, which will soon be made available for free in schools and public libraries across the province.

1,000 B.C. books in your pocket. Illustration by Dave Donald

As one of the first such projects in Canada, Best of B.C. Books Online has the daunting task of navigating the myriad legal and mercantile ambiguities of e-book distribution and sharing. “This is a pilot project in a bigger sense, that we’re setting some kind of standards with this project in Canada,” says Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. There are many details still to be negotiated between the libraries and publishers, such as the cost of electronic rights, whether they will be bought with a one-time purchase or an annual fee, and how much text readers can copy or print from these files.

Further complicating the project is the print publishing establishment’s wariness of e-books. Their concerns hinge on the risk of piracy, those of an unfamiliar marketplace, and the challenges of incorporating new technologies into their practices. E-books have yet to catch on with the public, but the success of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader in the U.S., and internet giant Google’s prospective settlement with the Writers’ Union of Canada over digitization rights to authors’ works shows that changes are afoot. Publishers are looking to futureproof their business, even if a full strategy isn’t yet clear.

Paul Whitney, the city librarian at the Vancouver Public Library, thinks the book industry is now where the music industry was 10 years ago, when fear of piracy made record companies hesitant to adopt new distribution methods. “Now the music industry understands that the notion of restricting content to one platform means it’s not going to succeed in the marketplace.”

At a time of crisis in the publishing industry, the Best of B.C. Books Online, which will go live in the summer of 2009, wants to ensure that Canadian content doesn’t get lost in the scramble to create a new model for the industry. “We want this to be a success story,” says Whitney, “with more Canadian content being available, more revenue for Canadian publishers, and more people accessing these Canadian books.”