Artistic expression is one of the ways an artist can convey identification with a particular place. Canadian musicians, for instance, tend to romanticise the rural areas of the country. Bands such as The Rural Alberta Advantage, The Wheat Pool, and Corb Lund & the Hurtin’ Albertans all refer to the iconic imagery of the Canadian prairies: the wide open skies, the massive grain elevators, the laid-back country-and-western attitude of the last province before the Rockies.
Despite the iconic imagery that these bands invoke, the hubs of the Canadian music industry are urban: Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Calgary, Halifax, Winnipeg. The clustering seen in these cities is not simply a practice in creating economic opportunities within the context of a dynamic urban network of labourers and firms, but also what Allen J. Scott refers to in Social Economy of the Metropolis as a ‘proto-urban form’: music production contributes to the identity associated with the country, the province, the city, and the neighbourhood that the musicians are working in. In a sense, Canada’s urban cognitive-cultural economies are the product of geographical location (i.e., proximity to other urban regions), extant industrial base (i.e., economic sectors that drive the local economy), and population demographics (i.e., dynamic or static local cultures).
Looking at the top position of the charts for the The R3-30, a weekly radio show featuring independent Canadian musicians on CBC Radio 3, the basic trends are not shocking: Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver house the country’s top independent musicians while also being the cities located in provinces with the highest proportions of cultural industry workers. What is perhaps not as obvious is that Halifax contributes far more musicians per capita as compared to the bustling metropolises of central Canada: the data for Halifax suggests that a more active, better-networked pool of musicians write and perform in the Nova Scotian capital, and is a comparatively strong producer of alternative rock bands, despite Halifax’s small size.
Unsurprisingly, particular cities tend to specialise in particular types of music: Halifax is well-known for not merely a relaxed atmosphere, but also for producing alternative rock bands; Edmonton, home of civic boosterism and a prairie identity, is a hub for country musicians; and London, a city that plays second fiddle to the more prestigious urban centres along the Windsor-Quebec corridor, produces a disproportionate amount of hip hop artists.
What do we learn from the clusters within Canada’s independent music scene? For starters, it suggests a certain vitality in smaller urban areas while its absence in cities that one would expect to be more productive. In a way, Halifax’s success in independent music production is a place-making experiment, making ownership of the Halifax identity less institutionally defined. The case of Toronto, by contrast with its much lower per capita rate of top musicians, can be seen as a weaker sense of citizen appropriation of public space, perhaps due to a saturation of the creative labour pool, with an extreme amount of musicians relocating to The Big Smoke for what they perceive to be greater opportunities for success and exposure.
Ultimately, the stereotypical hubs of Canadian cultural products (i.e., Toronto and Montréal) do not appear to produce successful musicians at the same rate as the less conspicuous and less populated urban regions (i.e., Halifax and Newmarket). It is clear that the cities that foster the most productive environments for independent Canadian musicians are not the ones that benefit from a large labour pool: rather, the quality of the environment, as well as the people within said environment, is what allows a clustered cultural economy to thrive.
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