Excerptcize

To follow up on an earlier posting that contended that government sponsored initiatives are capable of producing innovation in broadcasting I thought it was also worth highlighting our CanCon radio requirements and the Canadian Music Fund.  I’ll touch on CanCon in this posting and have something regarding the Canadian Music Fund in a piece to come later.

CanCon is shorthand for ‘Canadian Content’ and the label mostly explains itself; by law a certain amount of radio airplay must be Canadian Content.  The ratio of necessary ‘Canadianess’ varies depending on what genre(s) of music the station broadcasts, as well as the particular market they are in but a good shorthand is to figure that 25% of the broadcast content must be Canadian.  While not a perfect mechanism (it’s easy to find people arguing that CanCon should be entirely scrapped) it does serve to keep Canadian content on the airwaves.  While reading through Wikipedia’s article on this I saw the Arcade Fire mentioned as an example demonstrating CanCon’s failure.  It was only after the band started getting played in heavy rotation in the States that heavy Canadian airplay followed.  A counter example though would be the massive explosion of Feist; vehicles for promoting Canada’s independent artists were more refined in 2007 than they were in 2005 (ie CBC Radio3) and her airplay was building in Canada before the iPod commercial featuring “1-2-3-4″ sent her into the stratosphere.  As I see it, the problem with CanCon as it stands is that there is not enough emphasis on new artists and recordings.  Instead of scrapping the whole system it should be tweaked, so that if a broadcaster features new recordings, a certain percentage of their Canadian content has to be new as well.  Vancouver has a relatively new commercial radio station, The Peak FM that seems to be having some success playing lots of new, independent Canadian artists.  Hopefully they are starting to turn a profit so my referencing them is relevent.

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