Canada is now the sixth-largest music market in the world…only the US., Japan, the UK, Germany and France are bigger…not bad, considering that we’re living right next door to the biggest exporter of popular culture in the known universe—and considering that unlike Japan, Germany and France, most of our domestic music industry isn’t isolated and protected because of language…

I mean, the whole world consumes English-language music…what’s the market for Japanese music outside Japan?...or German music outside of Germany?...

Then there’s the matter of population…of those top six nations, Canada, with 36 million people, has the smallest number people…compare that to 66 million in both the UK and France and 83 million Germany…

Canada also exports far more music to the rest of the world than we should…every year, the export numbers grow bigger and bigger thanks to stars like Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Alessia Cara, Arcade Fire and a long list of artists that came before: Alanis Morrissette, Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Rush, The Guess Who and dozens and dozens of others…

And maybe most important of all, Canada has a super-strong domestic market…Canadians listen to and support Canadian music…and the country tends to be very proud of its homegrown talent…just look at the national outpouring of affection for The Tragically Hip in the summer of 2016…

But it wasn’t always this way…there was a time when “Canadian music” was a synonym for “substandard” and “not very good”…Canadians went out of their way to avoid Canadian music—unless it had received a stamp of approval from music fans in the United States…that was the only form of validation the country would accept…

That attitude is pretty much extinct now…and the roots of our current musical nationalism can be traced back to the days of the alt-rock 90s…

This is chapter 8 of our look at that decade…let’s call it “The CanRock Revolution”…

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