Radio Free Canada? Well, not quite.
The rules of airwaves, set by the federal government, have been relaxed so that hard and soft rock music can be mixed on the same radio station. But don`t play too much classical and country on the same station, or you could lose your license.
The looser rules are great news for radio stations.
”The rule changes make it easier to adjust from one format to another,” said Douglas Cunningham, president and principal owner of CIDC-FM in Orangeville, Ontario, north of Toronto. He said that in the old days-as far back as August-it could take six to eight months of paperwork and hearings to change a format. As of September, changes can be made right away.
”It gives the FM station greater flexibility to move with changes in music tastes or with the availability of certain types of music,” Cunningham said.
The Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission sets radio rules. Anything can be and is played on Canadian radio stations, but there are limits to mixing formats. For instance, a country station must play 70 per-
Radio
cent country music; the other 30 percent can be anything from Beethoven to the Beatles.
The man in charge of keeping an eye on this is Mike Amodeo, the commission`s manager of FM operations. He has spent most of the last 18 years at the commission and has never worked in radio. In September he helped bring in the big change, which combined hard and soft rock into a single category.
But station owners and managers are not happy about a rule change that requires an increase in Canadian content to 30 percent from 20 or 25 percent, depending on the location of the station. Keeping track of what is Canadian and what isn`t has become so complex that stations need a special computer program to figure out if they`re staying within the guidelines, Cunningham said.
”There isn`t much popular Canadian music out there right now,” he said. ”You can . . . play `Snow Bird` by Anne Murray only so many times.`
And it`s sometimes hard to know what`s Canadian and what isn`t. In a recent ruling, an album by Canadian singer Bryan Adams was determined not to be Canadian because the songs were co-written by his British producer. But U.S. singer Bonnie Raitt`s song ”Let`s Give Em Something to Talk About” was classified as Canadian because the songwriter was from Canada.
Many small stations have to employ one full-time person just to deal with federal regulations, Cunningham said.
One of those regulations forbids computerized radio, especially handy for running pre-programmed music overnight. There also are restrictions on small private stations linking up to do network programming.
”Only one radio station in four in Canada will make money this year,”
Cunningham said. ”If the (commission) doesn`t loosen up on regulations, a lot of stations will go under.”
