Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. Before 1971,

there really wasn't much of a Canadian music industry. Oh, sure, there were record labels and

recording studios and promoters and agents, but we didn't have what you'd call a

first world industry. Canada was basically a backwater, a place where the big labels had branch

offices. Anyone who wanted to make it big had to leave the country, usually for the United States.

But then came the Canadian content laws in January 1971, and overnight it became law that Canadian radio stations had to devote 30% of their playlists to Canadian artists.

This created an artificial demand for this music, to which a whole lot of people screamed bloody murder. But this demand needed to be

serviced. It was the law. So a modern music industry grew up around it. All the infrastructure

required to have a proper domestic music scene. That meant more record labels, more recording studios, more promoters, more agents,

more everything. A domestic star system began to emerge. Canadian started buying more music by

Canadian artists. And those artists who didn't want to bolt for the United States found that they

could actually make a pretty decent living by staying in Canada.

It took about 20 years for our music industry to mature into something truly world class,

and by the time we got to the 1990s, there was this sense that our best could compete with anyone or anything in the world.

And that's what everything exploded.

Canadian Generation Xers not only embraced the alt rock that was coming from the States,

you know, grunge, industrial, punk, whatever, but also all the homegrown stuff.

Walking into a store in, say, 1995 meant being faced with racks and racks of Canadian product right up front,

and people were mad for it.

This is our second half of our remembrance of some great Canadian can rock bands of the 1990s.

This is the ongoing history of new music Podcast with Alan Crice. That's I'm whether Earth with Not Quite Sonic from their debut record Dig, which came out in the summer of 1993.

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