The MAPL Test
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What quirky radio rule changed Canada's music industry?
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Chris Berube, sitting in for Roman Mars. Back in January, about 10 million people tuned into the hockey romance series Heated Rivalry. Even I watched it because the show is made in Canada by Canadians and I'm Canadian. And the Canadian-ness, it's kind of everywhere. The main characters in the show go to a cottage at one point, not a cabin. One of the hockey studs has an interview with a journalist in pretty passable high school French. Winnipeg is mentioned. Look, it's all there in the text. But if you ask me, the most Canadian part of the series is the music. That's producer and fellow Canuck, Max Collins. The soundtrack is loaded with artists from Canada. There's needle drops of songs by Feist and the Soul Jazz Orchestra and Dilly Dally.
To me, this was delightful. But the Canadian music wasn't obvious to everyone watching. I found this out when I threw on the show with my roommate, Keith.
Can I ask if you've ever been with another guy?
He knew and loved a lot of the songs on Heated Rivalry, like this power ballad by the band Wolf Parade. The song plays during the emotional climax of an episode when a closeted hockey player invites his boyfriend out to center ice for the first time, and they kiss.
Give me your eyes, I need sunshine.
But Key isn't originally from Canada, and they weren't aware that Wolf Parade is from Montreal. Actually, Key was shocked to hear that a lot of the big musicians they know are Canadians. Finger Eleven.
Oh, did not know that.
Yeah, yeah. Deadmau5.
Oh, I did not know Deadmau5 was Canadian.
Yeah. Oh, Michael Bublé.
Is Canadian? Yeah. What? Yeah, yeah.
Okay, maybe you're thinking, Wolf Parade's Canadian. Sure, why does this matter? To us Canadians, it matters. It matters a lot. If you are American and you have Canadian friends, perhaps you've noticed that any time a Canadian celebrity is mentioned, people like me love to point it out. Look, we just cannot help ourselves. Oh, did you know that Mac DeMarco is from Canada?
Mac DeMarco is from Canada?
Yes.
Part of the reason this game is so fun for us is because of the sheer volume of secretly Canadian artists. Sure, everybody knows Drake and Justin Bieber are from Canada, but when you start to dig in, we are literally everywhere. We're responsible for Nelly Furtado and Pup and Kaytranada and Propagandhi. This is just a small sample of an overwhelming list. Canada is a country with about 41 million people. That's only a little bit bigger than the population of California. But the country punches well above its weight in terms of very famous musicians. This hasn't always been true. 50 years ago, Canada's music industry was basically non-existent, and the most successful Canadian musicians were expats making it big in the United States.
But today, Canada has one of the biggest music industries in the world, and it's partly thanks to some good old-fashioned government meddling. It's a public policy that was really controversial, but it's been imitated all over the world. I'm talking about a policy called CanCon. Okay, so to understand this policy, we got to rewind to just before the dawn of Canada's music boom, the early 1960s. In those days, most of the stuff played on Canadian radio was produced outside of Canada. The biggest musicians at the time were mostly from the US and the UK, places with a bunch of recording studios to produce music and a bunch of record labels to distribute it and a bunch of radio stations to market it and a lot of fans to consume it.
But Canada, on the other hand, had pretty much none of that.
If you were a Canadian musician, there was essentially no modern music industry.
Alan Cross is a radio legend in Canada and host of a long-running documentary series called The Ongoing History of New Music.
Back then, there was very little in the way of development, nurturing, coaching, mentoring of Canadian talent.
It was just like, you know, get out there and play. Record labels in Canada were mainly set up to distribute American records domestically. And on top of all that, there was a stereotype that Canadian music was somehow inferior.
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