Numerous groups urge CRTC not to cut CanCon quotas for radio

Numerous advocacy groups and smaller broadcasters are recommending that the CRTC avoid cutting Canadian Content quotas for radio stations. These views come from a broad group of intervenors, writing in response to the Commission’s consultation on Canadian commercial radio, representing campus and community radio stations, ethnic broadcasters, associations representing Canadian musicians, and even the Quebec government. Some also advocated for the CRTC to change its CanCon requirements and oblige broadcasters to do more to support emerging artists or diverse cultural groups. In its intervention, the Forum on Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC) outlined a number of potential downsides, arguing that relaxing CanCon rules (which typically require radio stations to broadcast 50 per cent Canadian content) would result in a rapid reduction in airtime for Canadian artists. “Allowing Canadian commercial radio stations to become weak, homogenous copies of American stations would not just breach the Broadcasting Act, reduce Canadians’ access to Canadian content and impair Canadian musicians’ livelihoods, it would also reduce the distinctiveness of Canadian radio services,” the FRPC wrote. That runs counter to the attitudes of major broadcasters, who recently asked for the CRTC to relieve them of certain CanCon requirements. Performance rights organization SOCAN bluntly stated that no changes should be considered, pointing to the economic benefits that CanCon has on its approximately 130,000 members. “Over the past seven years, an average of 34.7 per cent of all royalties collected on radio were distributed to SOCAN songwriter and composer members. This indicates that the regulations created by the CRTC have a tangible, measurable and positive effect on the Canadian music industry.” An intervention from the Government of Quebec’s Ministry of Culture and Communications also noted the impact quotas have on the industry, although it criticized some (unnamed) broadcasters’ attempts to sidestep quotas for French-language music . “The Ministry deplores the use of techniques to circumvent quotas through improper use of montages and by broadcasting French-language music during off-peak hours,” the department wrote in French. A number of intervenors also recommended that the CRTC adjust its CanCon rules to ensure that a greater variety of Canadian music gets airtime, with the National Campus and Community Radio Association pointing out that quotas “do not support all artists equally”. “Particularly in the commercial radio context, they provide substantial benefits to a small number of well-known Canadian artists, and many other artists do not benefit at all, irrespective of merit.” Several intervenors, including the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA), suggested that that the quotas need to be tweaked, so that “a certain portion of the quota dedicated to emerging artists or by creating a maximum cap for the portion of the quota that can be filled by well-known and established Canadian artists”. CIMA also flagged problems with the now 50-year-old MAPL system -- the acronym stands for music, artist, performance, and lyrics -- used to determine whether music qualifies as Canadian content, stating that it “no longer adequately reflects the realities of songwriting and recording music today.” (For example, if a song is written by multiple people, and just one of those writers is not Canadian, it can easily fall outside of CanCon rules.) In its place, CIMA recommended a more flexible points system that could account for more factors, and could also assign extra points for diversity: for example, if a recording artist is Indigenous, or of an ethnic minority. “By including visible minorities into the program, we can play a part in addressing the systemic exclusion of so many artists in popular genres like Rock and Alternative music.” Despite this opposition to cutting CanCon quotas, some advocacy groups, including the Community Radio Fund of Canada, did indicate that they could support CanCon reductions, if commercial broadcasters were willing to pay more in Canadian Content Development (CCD) fees. “The CRFC can support a push by commercial radio to reduce Canadian content broadcasting requirements ONLY if there is an explicit commitment to not just maintain, but to augment support and funding for community stations,” it wrote. Under the CCD system, commercial broadcasters are required to make annual contributions to groups like the CRFC and music grants organization FACTOR. Forty per cent of those contributions can also go to an “eligible initiative” of a broadcaster’s choice (for example, a non-profit music festival). Some intervenors suggested that this discretionary amount is too high — the Indigenous Music Alliance recommended that it be reduced to 10 per cent of CCD funding, with the remainder going to a new fund focused on supporting women, Indigenous people, and visible minorities in music. “Moreover, we also propose that the National Indigenous Music Office should be deemed an eligible recipient of CCD funds,” the Alliance added. Such attitudes to the discretionary CCD funds were not universal, though: the South Asian Broadcasting Corporation, which owns a small number of ethnic radio stations, said that these discretionary funds have helped fund musical projects in ethnic communities, claiming that groups like FACTOR had typically ignored them. “FACTOR... do not provide meaningful grass roots level support to ethnic artists and do very little to fund ethnic artists who are not ready to record a single or an album. In fact, we have not seen any evidence that these organizations have been effective in outreach to emerging artists whose language is not English or French,” the company wrote. -Reporting by Tim Forster at tforster@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Numerous groups urge CRTC not to cut CanCon quotas for radio

Broadcast | April 1, 2021

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Numerous groups urge CRTC not to cut CanCon quotas for radio

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