This year’s JUNO Awards saw some of Canada’s best talent take the stage for Canadian music’s biggest night, but despite the fanfare and celebrities on the orange carpet, this year’s JUNO Awards felt somewhat unnecessary.
While recent award show trends have seen shortened run times and reduced focus placed on the awards in favour of spectacle, this year’s JUNOS felt like a CBC sponsored concert with award interruptions. This doesn’t appear to be a production mistake, but the result of nomination categories shaped by Americanized talent that ultimately decides who wins, who attends and what exactly the JUNOS celebrate.
Much like the Grammys, the JUNOS and the Canadian Recording Academy of Arts and Sciences hand out awards across multiple categories. This year, the academy presented 47 total awards. Representing every award in one show would not only be a daunting task, but one that viewers external to the industry would likely have little interest in watching.
The Grammys make this choice even more apparent, as the main award show exists solely to highlight the largest awards of the evening — the general categories. These awards also happen to feature the most A-list stars and help generate viewers and press in the days following the ceremony. This model works for the Grammys — global stars attend, perform and receive their moment in the spotlight — but when adopted by the JUNOS, it begins to break down.
Of the 47 JUNOS awarded by the academy this year, only eight awards were presented during the ceremony, with just five being true JUNOS. While this divide could make sense if the focus were placed on the general award categories — including Fan Choice, Album, Single, Artist and Group of the Year — this year’s broadcast included only three from the general field.
The evening’s questionable award selection becomes more consequential when looking at who actually wins these major awards.
This year the general categories were swept by Tate McRae, who won Album, Single, Artist and Pop Album of the Year. The absence of these major awards from the ceremony was palpable, but more surprising was McRae’s lack of meaningful acknowledgement of her historic wins.
Notably, McRae has accumulated four wins each for Album of the Year, Pop Album of the Year and Single of the Year — the latter earned four years consecutively — along with Artist of the Year for three straight years and two Songwriter of the Year awards.
McRae is clearly a JUNOS darling. The Recording Academy and Canadian audiences have a strong affinity for her music, but the disconnect between the commemoration the Academy seeks to give and the artist’s absence calls into question whether the system should continue awarding artists who operate primarily outside of the Canadian industry ecosystem.
The choice to present these awards before the broadcast becomes clearer when considering that McRae’s competition in many of these categories also included artists — The Weeknd and Justin Bieber — who are Canadian in nationality only.
If internationally dominant artists who rarely attend the awards are consistently the predictable winners, broadcasting these categories without recipients present to accept the honour would undermine the television value and exorbitant cost of the JUNOS. The ceremony is adapting to assumed big-ticket winners being absent.
This only illustrates a larger issue within how the JUNOS hand out awards and what counts as Canadian music and artistry. On the radio, Canadian content is strictly regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. 35 per cent of all content played on the radio must be Canadian, with these requirements defined by the MAPL system, which refers to music, artist, performance and lyrics.
At the JUNOS, albums produced, engineered, mixed and mastered outside of Canada — and designed for international markets — exist in the same competitive pool as smaller Canadian artists.
While the solution is not stripping these artists of their Canadian identity, it is worth considering why Canada is so focused on recognizing Canadian nationality at whatever cost it poses to Canadian musical culture. If success abroad becomes the primary metric of Canadian recognition, the JUNOS will stop discovering Canadian music and instead validate success already achieved elsewhere.
Canada’s cultural institutions may not be recognized on the same global stage as their American award counterparts, but that does not make them any less important. The JUNOS help define the Canadian music landscape and identity. Many prominent international artists were shaped by that identity. If the JUNOS simply copy the Grammys or the MTV Video Music Awards, their role and relevance begin to disappear in the minds of Canadian listeners and artists.
If the JUNO Awards seek to highlight Canadian artists by giving them a stage to perform on, they must also adapt their award principles to recognize and spotlight those same artists.