By barnaby
Boy Golden, Bob Moses, July Talk, The Beaches, Metric, Dear Rouge, The Glorious Sons, Arkells, Billy Talent, The Darcys, Monowhales, Anyway Gang, Mother Mother, and Dear Rouge stand out in the year-end Alt category.
A new survey measures attitudes around Bill 109, which would require digital platforms to prioritize French-language cultural content.
Debate over Québec’s Bill 109 is resurfacing with new force, as fresh consumer data adds a critical layer to the conversation.
A Léger survey released in late November shows that most Québec music streaming users oppose government intervention in determining what music appears on digital platforms — a notable finding as the province continues to deliberate on the bill.
As Billboard Canada reported, the legislation would require digital platforms to prioritize French-language cultural content. Escalating debate has widened the divide between the streaming industry and the cultural sector.
The Digital Media Association (DiMA), which represents platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, has been among the most vocal critics, warning the legislation could negatively impact consumer experience, artist revenues and platform operations in the province.
The new survey, commissioned by DiMA, found that 66% of Québecers believe the government should not influence the music available on streaming services, while 76% say they would oppose the bill if it resulted in higher subscription prices. Only 4% of respondents consider regulating streaming platforms a government priority, placing it far below concerns such as affordability, housing and health care.
The findings land as Québec’s National Assembly debates the bill, introduced on May 21, 2025, by Culture and Communications Minister Mathieu Lacombe. The bill — formally titled An Act to affirm the cultural sovereignty of Québec — aims to strengthen the visibility of francophone cultural content on digital platforms and would impose new obligations on major global streaming services and connected-device manufacturers.
At the Assembly in May, Québec’s French Language Commissioner, Benoît Dubreuil, reinforced this stance, telling L’Actualité that there is “a fairly broad consensus in Québec society on the need to impose requirements that promote francophone content,” highlighting strong institutional support for the legislation.
At the same time, DiMA has been pushing back against what it calls the broader nationwide “streaming tax battle," referring to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)’s now-paused plan requiring major foreign-owned platforms like Spotify and Apple Music to invest 5% of their Canadian revenues into Canadian content funds. DiMA’s “Stop the Streaming Tax” campaign has been criticized as “disingenuous” by some in the Canadian music industry, while services like Spotify have countered by highlighting the growth of francophone music on their platforms.
Despite ongoing tension, most survey respondents feel French-language music is already easy to find: 61% said discoverability is strong, citing playlists, algorithmic recommendations and search tools as their primary ways of discovering new music.
In a statement, DiMA president and CEO Graham Davies said the research underscores consumer concerns about potential unintended consequences — including higher costs and reduced personalization — cautioning that such outcomes could ultimately limit listener choice and diminish revenue opportunities for artists.
Québec cultural organizations and industry representatives have pushed back against claims that Bill 109 would limit consumer choice, instead framing the proposed legislation as a necessary tool to support French-language culture in an increasingly globalized digital environment.
Last spring, several major organizations and artists featured in Quebec media — including ARRQ (the Quebec Directors’ Guild), GMMQ (the Quebec Musicians’ Guild), SARTEC (the Quebec Society of Radio, Television and Film Authors) and UDA (the Quebec performers’ union) — voiced their support for stronger regulatory measures on streaming platforms. Their comments, published in Le Devoir, Radio-Canada and other Québec outlets, argued that market-driven discoverability alone has not been enough to ensure the long-term visibility of francophone works.
ADISQ, which represents Québec’s music and live performance industries, has also consistently supported regulatory intervention.
“It’s a first step in the right direction,” said CEO Ève Paré in a Le Devoir article published in late May, explaining that an over-reliance on platform algorithms risks sidelining French-language repertoire — particularly emerging artists — as global catalogues increasingly dominate recommendation systems.
While major cultural institutions have largely rallied behind Bill 109, artists working across Québec’s hip-hop, electronic, anglophone, Afro-diasporic and Latin scenes argue the legislation fails to reflect how audiences discover and consume music today.
Laval producer High Klassified, a central figure in Québec’s hip-hop scene and a multi-platinum artist known for his futuristic sound and collaborations with The Weeknd, Drake, Future, Migos, A-Trak, Metro Boomin, Damso and Hamza, frames the debate as a generational and technological mismatch tied to the rise of streaming.
“Streaming services give us the freedom to listen to what we want, when we want. It’s a new era, a new way of consuming music,” he tells Billboard Canada. “The government shouldn’t decide what we listen to. People choose for themselves — that’s the whole purpose of streaming.”
For High Klassified, that shift means government intervention should remain focused on older formats such as radio and television, where regulation has historically played a role and where audiences still expect it.
A similar disconnect is identified by community organizers working outside traditional francophone frameworks. Ximena Holuigue, founder of ISLAS, a Montréal-based cultural platform amplifying Latin, Afro-diasporic and globally rooted music scenes through showcases, conferences and community-driven programming, says Bill 109 feels incomplete if it does not reflect Québec’s multilingual creative reality, one that goes beyond the French and English binary.
While she understands the intent to protect local culture, Holuigue argues that Québec’s institutions and legacy media remain locked in a largely franco-centric framework — one that no longer reflects how younger, culturally diverse audiences engage with music today.
“New generations live in a global, digital and multilingual landscape that often goes beyond traditional models.” She adds that “Québec's institutions are still operating within a very franco-centric framework, while audiences are living within a diverse culture shaped by rap, Afro-diasporic and Latin music, and global streaming.”
For Holuigue, the recent survey results reinforce that disconnect. Rather than imposing discoverability rules on global platforms, Holuigue argues that governments should focus on structural support. “The government can support discoverability,” she explains, “but it should do so through funding, promotion and export strategies — not by imposing quotas that are difficult to apply on global platforms.”
For artists operating outside dominant francophone circuits, the implications of Bill 109 feel far more immediate. Rapper Zach Zoya, whose bilingual catalogue and international outlook have made him a vocal critic of the bill, warns that it could further marginalize non-francophone artists.
“It’s a really bad idea for non-francophone artists,” Zoya says. “It might help a handful of well-established francophone artists, but it’s terrible for our discoverability outside Québec and could widen the cultural divide between us and the rest of North America.”
Zoya notes that anglophone and multilingual artists already face pressure to leave Québec to connect with broader North American audiences — a reality compounded by a Québec-centric media ecosystem with limited reach beyond the province. He also points to the recent standoff between the Canadian government and Meta, which temporarily blocked Canadian news content on its platforms, as a reminder of how fragile digital visibility can be.
“Propping up French culture at the expense of everything else has never worked,” he adds. “It reflects a Québec imagined by the 50-plus crowd, not the multicultural reality young artists are actually living in.”
For Zoya, Bill 109 risks accelerating that isolation. “All of these measures point toward a slow asphyxiation of the non-francophone scene here,” he says. “Bill 109 would have felt like a death sentence to a younger version of me. I understand the intention behind it — but in practice, it’s a poor strategy.”
Those concerns echo warnings from producer High Klassified, who has cautioned that Bill 109 could ultimately strengthen the grip of major labels. “Privileged record labels would end up with even more control over the music we listen to,” he says, “leaving far fewer chances for independent and underground artists to be discovered.”
Holuigue similarly warns that if policy continues to overlook cultural realities on the ground, the scenes driving Québec’s musical evolution — particularly Latin and Afro-diasporic communities — risk being sidelined.
“A poorly calibrated approach could make these scenes even less visible,” she says, “including the Latin scene that ISLAS is involved in — even though these very scenes represent the natural, dynamic evolution of Québec culture.”
As Bill 109 moves through Québec’s National Assembly, the debate has become less about quotas and discoverability alone, and more about cultural authority in the digital age. The widening divide between institutions, artists, audiences and global platforms has turned the legislation into a broader referendum on who gets to shape Québec’s cultural future — and whether policy can adapt to a musical landscape defined by streaming.
