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Listening to Radio 3 on its satellite station at the office, and to the podcast on my couch at home late at night, I've discovered bands that I've guiltily passed along as my own personal discoveries on mixes that I've made for friends. Bands like Novillero, an absurdly hooky, swingy rock outfit from Winnipeg; No Luck Club, a super-intelligent instrumental hip-hop group out of Vancouver; Asthma, a creepy creator of fuzzy-chord melancholy from Calgary; and Airport, an acoustic duo from Halifax who sing about credit-card debt in just about the saddest pitch I've ever heard.
Where were these bands — the vast majority of them Canadian — coming from?
The answer involves an inspired bit of internet-based collaboration between radio station and musician. Radio 3's seemingly bottomless source of newfound music springs from the station's secret weapon: a website they created called newmusiccanada.com, where obscure bands from the Canadian wilderness can upload their music to Radio 3 directly, and pass along the rights to play it in return for exposure to a global audience.
"Most major label acts have signed up with rights organizations that own their publishing or reproduction rights," says Steve. "Those organizations then determine what you're allowed to do with your music. We set up this website, and it's become a home to independent musicians who own all their own rights. We put up a waiver asking them if they would grant us the right to podcast their music in exchange for exposure. These are artists who are woefully underrepresented on the radio, so there's really an impact for them after we've been playing them." And for listeners, a relentless stream of undiscovered music.
In essence, it was Canada's exceptionally restrictive radio regulations that forced Radio 3 to innovate. By law, Canadian satellite stations are mandated to play eighty-five-percent Canadian content. The law is called CanCon, and it applies to satellite radio specifically, presumably to stem the American-owned satellite radio companies (Sirius and XM) from flooding the Canadian airwaves with red, white and blue.
The CanCon restrictions essentially forced Radio 3 to mine the backwoods of its own country for original Canadian music rather than default to more established American bands. "In some ways, the restrictions and our response to them created our brand for us," says Steve. The result is a thousand hidden gems for the station to choose from, with more signing up on their website every day.
By choice, the weekly Radio 3 podcast is one-hundred percent Canadian music. So is newmusiccanada.com, which is fully public and contains free downloads of songs by approximately 8,000 bands. To help you navigate
"We're not hiring DJs with fifty-pound testicles named Flip and Buzz," says station director Steve Pratt.
this sea of music you've never heard of, the website offers comparisons to better-known American groups (i.e., "If you like Foo Fighters, you'll like Sinister Trailerpark Magic.")
On the satellite station, instead of segregating into hip-hop shows, indie-rock shows, etc., the station spreads them all throughout the twenty-four-hour spectrum, though music director James Booth tries to gear the time slots toward the individual DJs' personal preference. For instance, though DJ Lisa Christensen says she's "quite happy to play anything, I'm a bit of a headbanger. I'm probably the only one in the office. And I've found lots of outlets for this without resorting to Dungeonsy-Dragonsy, sex-in-the-back-of-a-car kind of stuff. Bands like Death From Above 1979, Whitey Houston, Priestess out of Montreal . . . " Accordingly, Booth tries to slant her timeslot toward this type of music. "It's much more fun to hear a person playing something they like than something that's not their taste. [The station] really wants the DJ to respond to the music, to tell people, 'This is an amazing fucking song and you have to get it,' rather than having a script that tells you to say things like, 'This track is really cooking things up this week.'"
It seems to work. With Lisa and the other hosts, I get the sensation that I'm not listening to a DJ so much as a friend with similar musical tastes telling me about a great album they recently unearthed. Their excitement about what they're playing is palpable: In a single recent podcast, Grant praised a track by The Deadly Snakes as "a swan song of high art," tossed out the homespun phrase "back-porch album" and noted with deadpan pitch that the latest release from Toronto-based one-man-band Final Fantasy, entitled He Poos Clouds, "has caused a raging debate in music-nerd circles across Canada." It sometimes feels as if Garrison Keillor moved his show to British Columbia and switched the format to indie rock. Explains Steve, "We're not hiring DJs with fifty-pound testicles named Flip and Buzz."
To bring the public control of Radio 3 full-circle, the station is planning to add a feature that will allow listeners to actually create the playlists that are broadcast over the air. Selecting from about 40,000 songs on the website, listeners will be able to create their own song lineups, and look at the lineups of other users as well. James Booth will then choose certain playlists from this pool to be aired.
"It'll be a much more interactive way for people to discover music that others are passionate about," says Steve. "You can share your own playlist, or browse other people's playlists and see what they've found. Once we get that going, we'll start using the user-generated playlists in the podcast and on the satellite station. We want to allow our audience to have as much ownership over what we're doing as possible."
Only a country with free health care for all and unlocked doors on their homes could have produced a radio station so open to the public.
"Newmusiccanada.com is a site based entirely upon user-generated content," Steve continues. "It's all Canadian bands uploading their music. We've got over 8,000 musicians already in there, and they've been doing it for years. So I feel like, in a way, we were a Web 2.0 early bird. Letting the audience in takes the final step."
And as Grant pointed out in one of his recent podcasts, Canadian music is in the midst of a golden age. Bands like the New Pornographers, Wolf Parade, the Hidden Cameras and Broken Social Scene have sparked a rock renaissance north of the border. Radio 3 gives that renaissance a global outlet with a populist spin that's distinctly Canadian. Only a society with free health care for all of its citizens and unlocked doors on their homes could have produced a radio station so open to the public.
When his September 22 podcast aired, Grant had just returned from serving as a judge at the first Polaris Music Prize, an award bestowed upon the best Canadian musicians of that year. "It was an honor to be part of the inaugural event," he said on the air, "but I felt like the country bumpkin — the kid from Deliverance, Nanook of the North — entering that cage-match of Toronto journalists. Let me tell you, they chewed me up and spat me out. By the time it was all over, I think I was quivering in the corner in the fetal position."
It was a funny bit, mainly because as listeners of Radio 3 know, it can't possibly be true. One need only picture the judge from the rising satellite-internet station alongside those reporters of aging Toronto print media and creaky terrestrial radio to imagine who was actually quivering in the corner, and who's likely to be around for Polaris number twenty. n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Will Doig is a contributor to New York magazine, Out, Black Book, Highlights for Children, and Washington D.C.'s Metro Weekly, where his column "In Exile" appears biweekly. He was raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Today he lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
