CRTC PUSHED FOR NEW CANCON RULES Emerging artists latest industry shakedown Sean Silcoff – Financial Post Canadian radio policy is not about giving the people what they want, but rather, what the government thinks they need. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission mandates that private radio must play 35% Canadian content and has laboured over the years to define what constituted "hit" songs and how often stations could play them. These and other rules may placate nationalists, artists, and record companies, but they ignore the listening public.
The average Canadian doesn't hate Canadian music, she just doesn't want to hear it 35% of the time. Left free to choose, Canadians would listen to just under half that amount, studies show. Retail sales bear that out.
That's irrelevant to the CRTC, which maintains a thicket of CanCon rules, egged on by record companies.
Now, they're back at it, trying to get the CRTC to force private radio to play more Canadian "emerging artists."
So far, radio has been spared this added burden, owing to the lack of a definition of "emerging artist." Not for long. The CRTC's CanCon cops released a study this week suggesting an emerging artist should be defined as one that had never reached the Top 40 before the prior year. Such artists were played 2.9% of the time on English radio, the survey said. This isn't enough for the record industry, nor the CRTC, which said in a 2006 policy review broadcasters should play emerging artists more often as a condition of their licences.
Duncan McKie, head of the Canadian Independent Record Production Association, says "we'd be happy with 50% of CanCon dedicated to emerging artists." The idea that nearly one in five songs on radio must be by bands nobody has heard of is absurd.
It's also a bit much for Rob Braide, past chairman of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and vice-president with Astral Radio. Radio has broken in new Canadian acts for years, he says: "People listen to radio for familiar music. The best way to introduce new music is by surrounding it with familiar music. That's a tried and true formula."
Our CanCon-obsessed broadcast regime doesn't need a state-mandated payola scheme (only without the payola). Radio stations should be free to play what the audiences want. This is just an attempt by a desperate record industry to avert collapse. Private radio in Canada has thrived in the past decade after being allowed to consolidate and hold its audience. Ad revenue rose 5.7% annually in the five years to 2006, to $1.4-billion, and net profit topped 17% of revenue in 2006.
The record industry is full of inept dinosaurs that can't figure out how to stop the bleeding from illegal Internet downloading. Artists such as Prince now give CDs away to drive more lucrative ticket, merchandise and licensing revenue.
So record companies have resorted to shakedown tactics: They've also asked for Canadian private radio to pay 170% more in copyright fees, or $200-million per year, after steadily increasing them in the past decade. Forcing radio to play more of their music and pay up will not save them. The industry is going through realignment, and, painful as it may be, the CRTC only serves as a distraction, telling everyone how the business should be run, when market forces will do the job. |