The problem with Cancon

I complain about Cancon laws a lot, but I'm glad we have laws that protect Canadian culture. The problem with the laws is the way they're implemented, which encourages laziness, especially in the commercial radio sector. I got another clear indication of this in the past few weeks.

One of the problems is that Canadian commercial radio rarely throws its weight behind a genuine Canadian artist. The only time this happens is when American radio picks up on a Canadian artist, then the Canadian stations really start pouring out the love for the artist. Admittedly, this can be hard to track just from listening to a Canadian commercial station. The proof in the pudding comes in the Top 40 Charts.

Two weeks ago, Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen cracked the Top 20 singles on Billboard, the American Top 40 singles charts. Before this, Jepsen was a token Canadian hovering in the low teens on the Canadian Top 40 singles charts. It's actually pretty rare for any Canadian artist to crack the Top 5 in Canada. I know this because I log both the US and Canadian charts each week as part of my job, and for the last year, I've been blogging about the Top 40 Canadian commercial charts on this very blog. Now, once the US charts got behind Jepsen and started playing her, the Canadian charts immediately responded, The week Jepsen cracked the US Top 20, Jepsen shot up to #3 on the Canadian charts. Before this, it had been at least a year and a half since a Canadian artist cracked the Top 5 in Canada.

Here is the reluctance of Canadian radio to play Canadian artists, and truly support them, laid out in black and white. It's very rare to see an truly Canadian grown artist get support on Canadian radio in the form of chart action. The last artist I can think of that we grew ourselves was Jann Arden. It usually takes US radio saying, "Hey, this is pretty good, we'll play it!" before we are able to say, "Hey, you know, this Canadian artist is pretty good! We'll play it too!". It's almost like commercial radio says, "We're not sure if we can support this Canadian act. Let's play some more American acts we know will work before we take a chance on this one." Why can't we say, "This is a great artist. Who cares if they're Canadian or not, we'll play them!"