Bad for consumers. Great for major Canadian labels. It does little for indie music. When Bieber, Drake start being played every hour I'm not sure anyone really wins.

When it first came out it helped expose some new music. What it became was another tool to feed the machine.

Chickity China, the Chinese chicken

You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'

Watching X-Files with no lights on

We're dans la maison

I hope the Smoking Man's in this one

Like Harrison Ford, I'm getting frantic

Like Sting, I'm tantric

Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy

Like Kurosawa, I make mad films, 'kay, I don't make films

But if I did they'd have a Samurai

Gonna get a set of better clubs

Gonna find the kind with tiny nubs

Just so my irons aren't always flying off the back-swing

Gotta get in tune with Sailor Moon

'Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes

That make me think the wrong thing

All of which is to say, without CanCon do we really think this would encapsulate the late 90's experience in Canada?

I think that's ultimately where it backfired. Back when it was introduced it made sense, a way to keep American media and culture from completely drowning out our own. But now that most stations are required to have 40% of their content Canadian, you end up with loops of Bieber, Drake, Rush, BNL, or the Hip getting played every 20-25 minutes. It honestly gets tiring hearing "Courage" or "Tom Sawyer" played 3-4 times during my 8-hour shift, every single day.

That was also the situation in the late-90s when I was listening to the radio all day in Toronto. I would argue that it actually hurt the development of the Canadian music scene in many respects because it made everything so top heavy. You were either the Hip, BNL, or OLP or you weren't on the radio. A select few bands reaped all of the benefits. Ironically, these bands would have found success without the MAPL system, but with it they were incredibly over-exposed in Canadian markets. The scene was also quite stagnant because even a "New Rock" station like the Edge would play the same set of Canadian songs for years at a time.

It's even worse on TV. Stuff like Stargate SG-1, a show set in the U.S, geared towards a U.S audience, is about secret U.S Air Force operations is considered Canadian content because it has Canadian writers, actors and is filmed in B.C for financial reasons. The whole point was to encourage "Canadian Culture".

If the Canadian government wants to support Canadian artists, just pay them. Don't force other people to pay.

Yeah but that would involve a line item in the budget, whereas this is stealthily hidden in the cost of media subscriptions.

They could just make art that people want to buy.