Before 1971, there really wasn’t much of a Canadian music industry…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 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…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 which a lot of people screamed bloody murder about…

But this demand needed to be serviced, so a modern music industry grew up around it—all the infrastructure required to have a proper domestic scene…that meant more record labels, more recording studios, more promoters, more agents…

A domestic star system began to emerge…Canadians started buying more music by Canadian artists…and those artists who didn’t want to bolt for the united states found that they could make a 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 a sense that our best could compete with anyone in the world…

That’s when everything exploded…Canadian generation Xers not only embraced the alt-rock that was coming from the States—grunge, industrial, punk, whatever—but also the homegrown stuff…walking into a record store in, say, 1995, meant being faced with racks of Canadian product right up front…and people were mad for it…

This is our second half of our remembrance of some great Can-Rock bands of the 90s…

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