The Canadian government is set to introduce legislation that would see a variety of audio and video streaming platforms give greater prominence to local musicians and creators.

Bill C-11 was approved by the House of Commons of Canada earlier this week, with the Washington Examiner noting that it requires “an essentially ceremonial vote in the Senate” to be passed and then put into effect.

This is the second time the bill was originally debated in 2021, but the calling of a snap election in September of that year meant it was parked.

What this will in effect mean is that if a user of platforms like Netflix
NFLX
Spotify and TikTok have a Canadian IP address, the services will be required to return a certain amount of content created in Canada in search results.

A number of platforms that will be affected by this have spoken in their opposition, warning against, like the the wall street journal puts it, “unintended consequences, such as hurting the people the new policy is meant to help.”

Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Canadian Heritage, replied that this will greatly benefit the country’s cultural industries. “[It] will help create good jobs in the cultural sector, make Canadian content more accessible and make it easier for people to find Canadian music and stories from here,” he told the The Wall Street Journal.

The country has a long-standing quota for radio production and this government move could see a similar policy applied to companies like Spotify, Apple Music and TikTok.

Currently, commercial radio in Canada must ensure that at least 35% of popular music broadcast between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on weekdays is Canadian. For CBC and Radio-Canada stations, the requirement is higher, with at least 50% of the music broadcast each week having to qualify as Canadian content.

Other countries also have a cultural protectionist stance towards radio quotas, such as France (where it was reduced from 40% to 35% in 2016) and New Zealand (where it is 20%) .

If it is relatively simple to introduce a quota system for radio – where most stations have rotation-based playlists that are decided in advance by the station’s programmers and show producers – it gets more complicated in the context of a music streaming platform.

In these cases, they operate on a hybrid approach where the playlist and recommendations are editorially curated (i.e. decided by internal music teams) as well as algorithmically generated (i.e. decided by their tailor-made recommendation software).

Spotify’s flagship playlist brand, New Music Friday, for example, is localized for a host of different markets, and so already mixes local selections with international tracks. However, for major playlists, such as Release Radar and Discover Weekly, these are unique to each user, based on their past listens, likes, skips, and additions to their own playlists. .

How this becomes law in Canada and how it is implemented will be closely watched by other governments.

Even though they don’t currently have a radio quota, they will look at streaming services and wonder if they are doing a good job promoting local creators or if they are a new catalyst for imperialism. culture where a handful of powerful nations impose their culture. on the rest of the world.

A recent discussion I had with the head of a major music company in Germany raised this issue and they said they would like to be able to ask for a quota system on music streaming services to better promote acts Germans and German-speaking.

What is happening in Canada, and how easy it is for streaming platforms to meet legislative obligations, could have significant ripple effects for other markets that had never even considered a quota before.