The fight to dial down French-language radio quotas
MONTREAL— For minority groups, even the smallest bump in the road can seem like an existential mountain. But the one facing Quebec’s francophone musicians could in fact be fairly significant.
In a world of streaming and downloading, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission wants to decide what is more important: giving pop radio listeners what they want, or giving them what may be crucial to keeping Québécois culture alive.
Public hearings on the matter have been delayed. Still, the decision looms and the two options seem far apart.
There are about a hundred private francophone radio stations in Quebec and another half-dozen in Ontario and New Brunswick that are pushing for their French-language music quotas to be scaled back.
The stations, owned by Bell Media, Cogeco and other companies, say they need greater flexibility to keep up with online competitors who can play the music that best connects their paying advertisers to their listening demographic, be it French or English.
The national regulator appears to agree that radio stations need a break, or at least “greater flexibility.”
Current CRTC rules state that 35 per cent of all music on private pop radio stations, both English and French, must be Canadian. But the francophone stations must ensure that 65 per cent of their music is in French.
The stations now see as a penalty a rule drafted in the 1970s to protect French-Canadian culture.
Quebec continues to enjoy a wealth of talent for a market of just eight million souls thanks in part to its cultural policies, but it is dealing with the same challenges as everyone else: lower ticket sales for concerts, a decline in physical album sales and an audience that increas- ingly goes online for musical entertainment.
That online audience tends to be the younger demographic sought out by advertisers. According to audience surveys, those francophone listeners who do tune in to a radio station for music appear to be slowly but surely migrating to English-language stations. The trend has been noticed in Montreal but is undeniable in the more bilingual market of Gatineau, right across the river from the predominantly English stations of Ottawa.
Even in the deepest regions of francophone Quebec such as Jonquière, where 98 per cent of the people identify French as their mother tongue, a group of students told the CRTC it is the ability to get music they want when they want it that has them scurrying online.
Despite that, they seem to agree there is a difficult-to-calculate value in having stringent regulations that push francophone music to the forefront.
As one student wrote, would the world have had Quebec stars like Karim Ouellet, Alex Nevsky, LouisJean Cormier or Les Trois Accords without the helping hand of Frenchlanguage radio quotas?
The private radio stations have promised that if their quotas are reduced they will commit to producing five years’ worth of 30-second profiles featuring emerging francophone Québécois artists to run three times a day on 65 stations. That’s nearly 200 profiles each day, more than 1,350 a week, or almost 71,000 each year at an annual cost of $4.5 million.
None of this pleases Quebec politicians. The provincial legislature passed a unanimous motion in September denouncing what it sees as the CRTC’s bias in favour of the radio stations. In its submission to the CRTC hearings, the provincial culture ministry said any reduction in French-music radio quotas will do nothing to halt the progression to online music sites.
What’s suggested, but is left unsaid, is that Quebec would rather see broadcast regulations applied to the web than the bar lowered for radio stations. That’s not an option the CRTC is even considering at the moment.
Quebec’s singers, composers and songwriters brought much the same message to last weekend’s annual music awards show, organized by the Quebec Association for the Recording, Concert and Video Industries, known by its French acronym ADISQ. There, the big winner was veteran rocker Jean Leloup, who picked up three Félix trophies, and Ariane Moffatt, who won two awards.
As the host of the show, comedian Louis-José Houde, noted, the two most popular Quebec TV shows in the past decade have been La Voix and Star Académie. Both feature young, aspiring Quebec musicians singing primarily francophone songs.
“That must show there is a public interest for songs from here,” he said. En Scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: awoods@thestar.ca