Happy Canada Day! And with that in mind, here’s a quick history of CanCon.
On January 18, 1971, it became law for all Canadian radio stations to devote at least 30% of their playlists to Canadian music. What qualified as "Canadian" can be complicated, so we’ll leave that for another time.
Why put in this quota? Because before 1971, there really wasn’t much of a Canadian music industry: few record labels, few studios, few managers and few promoters. The Canadian Content rules were more than just a way to give Canadian music a chance to develop against all the material that was coming in from the US and the UK. It was also an industrial strategy that forced the creation of an infrastructure which would give Canadian artists the tools they needed to succeed and for a Canadian music fans to hear Canadian music.
It was a struggle, but now our music and our music industry has developed to the point where it can stand next to the best in the world.