The MAPL Test

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1:30This 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.

2:14The 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, Key. Yes? Unheated Rivalry. Can I ask if you've ever been with another guy? Key knew and loved a lot of the songs Unheated 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.

3:00But 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 Buble. 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.

3:49Look, we just cannot help ourselves. Oh, did you know that Mac DeMarco is from Canada? Mac DeMarco is from Canada? 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 Kay Trinata 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.

4:34This 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.

5:20The biggest musicians at the time were mostly from the U.S. and the U.K., 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.

6:05I 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. Canadian radio stations had this thing that Canadian music was substandard or not popular or had no potential, no commercial or ratings appeal. Alan is not exaggerating here. Another Canadian music industry legend, Stan Cleese, saw this bias firsthand. Here's Cleese recounting an experience he had in an interview with music historian Kenneth Murphy. The guy opened the little envelopes that they got From the record companies looked at it and he said, Canadian shit threw it against a cement brow qual and shattered and fell to a flaw.

6:54The thinking was, you're just not good enough. If we put your song next to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or any of the other music coming out of the United States, it would sound bad. It wouldn't, it did not meet the standards, which may have been unfair and prejudicial, but that was the attitude. With this lack of infrastructure and this bias against Canadian musicians, there were two paths you can take to become a Canadian hitmaker. Path one, leave Canada for more fertile musical soil. This was the path taken by some of our most notable folk musicians at the time, like Leonard Cohen, who moved out to New York City, or Neil Young, who went out to Los Angeles.

7:34For those who couldn't make the move abroad, and those who didn't want to, there was path two. Ride the coattails of the British invasion, baby. Some bands would slap a Union Jack on their instruments, and others would fraudulently write things like England's number one group on their tour posters. Jack London and the Sparrows took it a step further. While their frontman was from the UK, the rest of the band was Canadian and put on fake English accents.

8:13In a similar fashion, a Winnipeg garage rock band, formerly known as Chad Allen and the Expressions, obscured their origins to trick Canadian radio stations into playing their music. They had just recorded a cover of Shaken All Over. Quivers down my backbone I got the shakes in my backbone But in the Canadian music is bad mindset of the mid-60s, this Canadian record had to be fed to radio stations in a sneaky way. So they pressed up a whole bunch of records and they took them to radio stations across the country and they played them this record without telling them who it was. The label only said, guess who?

8:53And in 1965, it sounded like a British invasion band. And they were, oh, this is really cool. From then on, the new name stuck. And the guess who went on to write chart-topping classics. Canada didn't have a strong sense of national pride in the 50s and 60s. The music industry was a prime example of this. Musicians had to hide their Canadian-ness or move away just to find success in Canadian markets. But near the end of the 1960s, Canada had a big surge in national pride. In 1967, the country turned 100, and the government of Canada was determined to celebrate in style. It was a wild year. There were new festivals launching, there was a months-long cross-country canoe race, and undoubtedly the biggest celebration, the one that captured the attention of the whole world, was Expo 67.

9:49Expo 67, the greatest show on earth. Expo 67 was a world's fair held in Montreal over six months. The fair saw 50 million people come through its gates. That's more than twice the entire population of Canada at the time. It was one of the most successful world exhibitions. And it helped shine an international spotlight on the country at large. Suddenly, though, Montreal and Canada have found an identity and reputation that owes nothing to the past. I think of 1967 as being a bit of a watershed moment. Aaron McLeod is a music journalist and educator. Like all of these things sort of come together as a means of attempting to push forth a notion of what it means to be Canadian, in the face of the increasing ability of the United States to spread its cultural dominance quite literally everywhere.

10:46Coming out of its centennial year, Canada's national pride had pulled a 180. Canadians had just experienced 12 months of intense patriotism. And it felt good. But that sense of pride didn't match up with the state of Canada's cultural landscape. The music sector was still in rough shape. Enter our unlikely hero of arts and culture, the Feds. On February 12th, 1970, Canada's cultural regulator, the CRTC, proposed some changes to the licensing requirements for all broadcasters. The goal was to support Canadian musicians and to prop up the industry. And to accomplish this, the CRTC made it mandatory for every Canadian radio station to broadcast a certain amount of Canadian music every week.

11:37This was such a big deal. The CBC, Canada's public broadcaster, cancelled their regular programming that night to talk about it at length. Good evening, I'm Gordon Donaldson with Normandy Polk. Today has been a pretty dramatic one for broadcasting in Canada. A 30 % Canadian content rule for the use of music by radio stations. A 30 % mandate for Canadian music on the radio. These laws became known as Canadian content laws, and the content itself became known as CanCon. Now, was Canada the first country in the world to try out something like CanCon? Eh, no. Australia beat us to the punch in 1942.

12:21But their regulations were pretty loose. The goals for CanCon regulations were more strict, thanks to a very picky bureaucrat named Pierre Junot. We believe that there is enough talent in Canada. It's a matter of making room for the new talents that are developing in Canada. Junot was the chair of the CRTC. And as the biggest cultural rulemaker, he was determined to have Canadian music played all the time on the radio. But before that could happen, the CRTC would have to find the answers to some pretty big questions. Questions like, what makes a piece of music Canadian? This might sound simple, but just think about this for one second.

13:06To be a Canadian song, does the musician have to be Canadian? Does the song itself have to be recorded in Canada? How many members of the band have to be from Canada? It gets complicated really fast. Even Pierre Junot did not have a clear idea in those early days. Is there a definition of Canadian? There are so many variables that you have to consider that you can't make a general ruling. You can have a certain number of guidelines. Getting the answer to that really was uncharted territory. So after consulting with industry experts, the CRTC came up with a system that would help determine if a song qualifies as CanCon.

13:46And just to really drive home the whole Canadian-ness of it, they called it the Maple System. Okay, here's how it works. Maple is a four-letter acronym, M-A-P-L. Each letter signifies a part of a song's production process, music, the artist, the performance, and the lyrics. A song has to check off at least two of the four letters to qualify as CanCon. To check off the M, you need music that's composed entirely by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. For the A, you need an artist performing the song who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident. For the P, the performance, live or in studio, has to be recorded in Canada.

14:33For L, the lyrics of the song have to be written entirely by a Canadian or a group of Canadians. So, let's pretend that we are a radio DJ from 1971, and let's test out the maple system ourselves. Say we want to play A Case of You by Joni Mitchell, who is Canadian, by the way. The instrumentals, as in the music, are written by Mitchell, as are the lyrics. That's the M and the L. Mitchell is a Canadian artist, born in Fort McLeod, Alberta. That counts as the A. But the song was recorded in Hollywood. So the performance, the P, doesn't count. That means A Case of You checks off three out of four maple boxes.

15:14And the song counts as CanCon. That's four and a half minutes down. And now you only have to fill 13 and a half minutes before meeting our quota for the hour. Sounds great, in theory. But right out of the gate, Canadian content rules ran up against a big issue. There just wasn't much buy-in from commercial radio stations. They still just wanted musicians who were already established in the U.S. I was a programmer in the 1980s, and I can tell you that any Canadian record we added or played was done begrudgingly, rightly or wrongly. I'm just telling you that the attitude generally was it was ratings poison unless it was already big in the U.S.

15:59Granted, there were some Canadian musicians making it big in the U.S., like Neil Young, The Guess Who, Joni Mitchell. but critics of CanCon were concerned there simply wasn't enough decent Canadian music to meet the requirements. So radio programmers, needing to fill a third of their weekly broadcast with the supposed ratings poison, came up with other creative solutions to play CanCon music without sacrificing listenership. Like sneaking all of their CanCon music into a time slot when no one was tuning in. What a lot of radio stations would do is they would edit all the Canadian songs that they had to play down to 90 seconds each, and they'd play them all between 11 and midnight.

16:41Or they'd have specialty programs on Sunday night where they'd play nothing but Canadian music in order to fulfill their quota. These time slots became known in the industry by the very unfortunate moniker, beaver hours. The CRTC caught on to this trick pretty quickly, and they amended the law to require CanCon during peak listening hours. So that's Monday to Friday between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. So radio DJs tried another scheme. They started playing songs that were definitely not Canadian, but still managed to sneak their way into the Maple system. Picture this. It's 1972. You're a radio DJ sitting at the controls, and you're about to cue up Elvis Presley's new single, Burning Love.

17:26Your music director bursts in and tells you, you need to play more Can-Con. And so, instead of playing Burning Love, you cue up Elvis' Can-Con song. Yep, America's king of rock and roll has music that counts as Can-Con. A song called Early Morning Rain. In the early morning rain With a dollar in my hand Early Morning Rain was originally written and performed by a Canadian singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot. In the early morning rain With a dollar in my hand With a naked in my heart Remember, a song only needed to meet two out of four letters in the maple system. So despite the fact that Elvis was not a Canadian artist, and that his cover was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, the music and the lyrics were written by a Canadian.

18:27Maple test passed. CanCon certified.

18:33So non-Canadian musicians could benefit from this system, and it turns out some Canadians were getting locked out by it. Remember Jack London and the Sparrows, that fake British but actually Canadian band? Well, they went on to become the very famous classic rock band Steppenwolf. But the band added an American singer named John Kay as their frontman. So most of the songs they wrote together stopped qualifying as CanCon. Basically, if you collaborated with a non-Canadian, your music could be disqualified. The Kingston, Ontario pop rocker Brian Adams found this out the hard way when he released his album Waking Up the Neighbors in 1991.

19:14Adams recorded the album in the U.K., and he co-wrote the music and lyrics with a South African music producer, Mutt Lang. So none of the songs on that album qualified as CanCon. Brian Adams, born in Kingston, raised in Vancouver, huge star in the 1980s. I mean, there's nobody more Canadian than Brian Adams. Canadian radio stations, it's Brian Adams, of course it's CanCon. So we started playing it, and then the CRTC said, not so fast. Ever since his album got disqualified, Bryan Adams has been really vocal about hating CanCon laws. Here he is in the 90s speaking to the press and just trashing the system.

19:52I think it's a disgrace, and I think it's really a shame that we have to deal with this kind of stupidity all the time. Why can't we just deal with artists and musicians the way every other country deals with them, which is just with some respect, you know? And I just think it inhibits people. Who wants to have an international record and then be called un-Canadian or un-British? I mean, you just never hear it. You'd never hear Elton John being declared un-British. It wouldn't. It's just a disgrace. Yeah, and that just underscores our point how stupid this is. Maple's system is terribly, terribly flawed.

20:26So in the early years, CanCon was not well-received. Radio DJs hated it. And the regulator had some kinks to iron out on the whole who is Canadian front. But over time, something strange and surprising happened. The CanCon system started to work. It was a basic matter of supply and demand. CanCon laws created an instant need for music that could pass the maple test. Once this artificial demand was created, you had to come up with something that would feed that quota. If we were going to play a lot of this music on the radio, well, then we needed an infrastructure, an industry to supply that music.

21:08At their core, CanCon regulations were an industrial policy. The system created a market for songs by Canadians, and that stoked a need for Canadian studios to record in and Canadian producers to help with songwriting. Music slowly got better because we had better studios, we had better producers. Artists began to develop realizing they were just thrown on the radio because they needed to be on the radio. Artists began to compete with each other in Canada for these increasingly coveted radio slots. We put it on the radio. People loved it. Give us more. By the 1980s, there was enough organic demand for Canadian music in Canada that musicians were able to build a career here without needing to move to the U.S.

21:55Take, for example, Corey Hart, the sunglasses at night guy.

22:12Maybe you've heard this song before. It's great. It was a hit single around the world. And while Corey Hart might have been a one-hit wonder in most countries, in Canada, he was a machine. making chart toppers until 1998. And there are lots of cases like this. This also created a world where Canadians have a very skewed vision on who is actually famous. When certain songs play on the radio all the time, it hasn't always been clear that the band is getting a boost from CanCon. In reality, most of these bands have little to no traction outside of Canada. Back in the 90s, there was this bubblegum pop duo called Prozac.

22:58Their music videos were all over Canadian TV. I always thought they were European, but nope, it's CanCon, baby. This was a super common thing that happened to Canadian singers and musicians. Some CanCon bands became kind of like a hometown hero, but for an entire country. The most prominent example of this is the Tragically Hip. They became so famous, a broadcast of their final concert was watched by 12 million Canadians. That is about a third of the total population at the time. Outside of Canada, they are nowhere near that popular. CanCon may have kickstarted the industry by mandating a spotlight for Canadian musicians on the radio, but once Canada had proven to be a steady stream of good music, record labels from outside the country started recruiting our talent, even in smaller cities, like Halifax.

23:52At the time, it was such a story, like a Cinderella story, like, who's this band from Halifax? This is Jay Ferguson, the guitarist and vocalist in an alt-rock band called Sloan. Feels good to do it, even if you shouldn't Don't let people mess you around They were pioneers of Canada's indie music boom in the early 90s. Jay started the band with his friends Chris, Patrick, and Andrew just after college. At the time, Halifax didn't have any massive stadiums to dream of selling out, or any record label headquarters to send your demo tapes to. Sometimes there weren't even any venues to perform in. So there were a lot of people who had the get-up-and-go to organize underground gigs, or the YMCA or YWCA, you could rent it out.

24:41Or Chris even at one point rented out a storefront, an abandoned storefront, rented it for a month, and had a gig every weekend, you know what I mean? Shortly after their first single came out, Sloan got played on the radio a ton. And once they had a foothold on the air, they caught the attention of some big wig record label scouts. And then Geffen, the label that signed Nirvana, offered Sloan a contract. That put a huge spotlight on Halifax's music scene. Once we got out and we were signed by Geffen, And there are people from American major and independent labels going, what's going on in Halifax?

25:20Like, why is Geffen signing this band that have played a dozen shows? So when judging CanCon as a policy, we have to ask, how well did it actually work? It's clear that in an industrial sense, it went really well. By the mid-90s, Canada's music industry became the sixth largest in the world, beating other countries with much bigger populations like Italy and Mexico and Brazil. Other countries started copying our system, too. By 1987, the Philippines introduced a music quota for radio. Then France created a French-language radio mandate in 1996. Then similar laws popped up in South Africa, Uruguay, Malaysia, Sweden.

26:06And today, every continent except Antarctica has at least one country with a local content quota. But while this suggests things were going great, the maple system is far from perfect. One critique of CanCon is that it actually creates a stigma around Canadian music. I saw this firsthand when reporting on the story. Despite being part of this innovative, pro-artist Canadian music ecosystem, nobody wants to be identified as making CanCon. Has anybody ever referred to Sloan as a CanCon band? No one's ever said that to my face. Let's just put it that way. Jay Ferguson again. And he totally saw this inferiority complex around Canadian music firsthand.

26:50So we would go to England in the early days in 92, 93. Oh yeah, next up was Red Cross and they're great. They're from California, blah, blah, blah. And then Verve are playing, yeah, up and coming. And then, oh, Sloan, they're from Canada. They don't count. So even with other countries emulating our system, Canadian content laws haven't done a good job at getting the rest of the world to take Canadian musicians seriously. Roly Pemberton is a rapper from Edmonton, Alberta. He performs under the stage name Cadence Weapon.

27:22And he says CanCon, it can create this feeling of our bands being tokenized in a way. I think there's a bit of an inferiority complex about ourselves. With CanCon out there, it's like, oh, so you're only able to get played because they have to play it. And nobody's listening to you because they want to listen to you. It's forced upon us all, right? So then there's this idea that we're lesser than because we have this benefit of CanCon. I think Canada is at least partially to blame for this inferiority complex. The cutesy naming conventions for this inherently nationalistic mandate gives the music industry an air of unseriousness.