Lost CanRock Bands of the 90s: Part 2
b'Before 1971, there really wasn\\u2019t much of a Canadian music industry\\u2026sure, there were record labels and recording studios and promoters and agents, but we didn\\u2019t have what you\\u2019d call a \\u201cfirst-world\\u201d industry\\u2026\\n\\nCanada was a backwater, a place where the big labels had branch offices\\u2026anyone who wanted to make it big had to leave the country, usually for the United States\\u2026\\n\\nBut then came the Canadian content laws in January 1971\\u2026overnight, it became law that Canadian radio stations had to devote 30% of their playlists to Canadian artists\\u2026this created an artificial demand for this music which a lot of people screamed bloody murder about\\u2026\\n\\nBut this demand needed to be serviced, so a modern music industry grew up around it\\u2014all the infrastructure required to have a proper domestic scene\\u2026that meant more record labels, more recording studios, more promoters, more agents\\u2026\\n\\nA domestic star system began to emerge\\u2026Canadians started buying more music by Canadian artists\\u2026and those artists who didn\\u2019t want to bolt for the united states found that they could make a decent living by staying in Canada\\u2026\\n\\nIt took about 20 years for our music industry to mature into something truly world class\\u2026and by the time we got to the 1990s, there was a sense that our best could compete with anyone in the world\\u2026\\n\\nThat\\u2019s when everything exploded\\u2026Canadian generation Xers not only embraced the alt-rock that was coming from the States\\u2014grunge, industrial, punk, whatever\\u2014but also the homegrown stuff\\u2026walking into a record store in, say, 1995, meant being faced with racks of Canadian product right up front\\u2026and people were mad for it\\u2026\\n\\nThis is our second half of our remembrance of some great Can-Rock bands of the 90s\\u2026\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'