Big Shiny Tunes, 25 years later | “A point of reference for a whole generation”

The first compilation Big Shiny Tunes was published 25 years ago. Sixteen other albums of the franchise, assemblies of regional discoveries and planetary hits, were published until 2009. Decryption of a phenomenon that marked a whole generation of Canadians.

Charles-Éric Blais-Poulin
Press

The phenomenon

As soon as it was released on December 3, 1996, Big Shiny Tunes (BST) is proving to be a great success. The compilation of popular and alternative music published by Universal and the broadcaster MuchMusic / MusiquePlus is certified triple platinum: more than 300,000 copies are sold. However, it was the following year that the phenomenon took on unprecedented proportions in Canada. BST 2, where Radiohead, Smash Mouth and Blur rub shoulders with Montrealers Bran Van 3000 and his Drinking in LA, will sell 1,233,000 copies. It will be the third best-selling album in the country, according to the 1995-2010 review by Nielsen SoundScan. “The albums have become a landmark for an entire generation, especially for the older millennial segment,” said Mark Teo, Toronto-based digital content strategist and author of Shine: How a MuchMusic Compilation Came to Define Canadian Alternative Music, and Sell a Zillion Copies. Big Shiny Tunes remains one of the few fragments of Canadian culture that can be considered relatively universal. ”

The interest of the “majors”

For 13 years, BST has established an unprecedented partnership between three major international record companies: Warner, EMI and Universal. Each has agreed to take turns working with MuchMusic – and MusiquePlus – to develop compilations of popular, emerging or alternative pop-rock songs. “Record companies were very profitable from the mid to late 1990s,” notes Mark Teo, ex-cultural columnist. BST came out at a time when alternative music was becoming pop music. This is what the general public listened to. MuchMusic and MusiquePlus had huge audiences and massive reach. They took hold in homes across the country and reached out to a valuable demographic: teens and young adults. The Canadian market was certainly limited in size, but the two stations had a great grip on it. Mark Teo underlines the effectiveness of the “marketing machine” around the project, launched and promoted each year by Much as the holiday season approaches.

The canadian angle

Over the course of the compilations, many local groups from across Canada have found a place of choice between hits from U2, The Chemical Brothers or even REM ” Big Shiny Tunes, unlike Now or to Absolute 90s, highlighted Canadian artists, observes Mark Teo. They account for about a third of the songs. Take the first BST, for example: it opens with a song from Mother Earth; a song by Sloan follows a piece by Red Hot Chili Peppers; and it ends with a title of Pluto. When you listen to the album, it’s huge, because it places regional emerging artists alongside Radiohead, Foo Fighters and so many others. For listeners who are less familiar with alternative music, this is major: you may have bought the compilation for the Bush song, but you are discovering Sloan through the band. ”

The Montreal scene

A handful of Montreal groups took advantage of the showcase BST. This is notably the case of Bran Van 3000, Simple Plan, Mission District and Sam Roberts, who has accumulated four appearances (volumes 7, 8, 11 and 13), five counting Dirty Water, a collaboration with k-os selected for the 2004 compilation. In terms of selections, the singer of Brother down is preceded only by the groups Nickelback (7), Sum 41 and Blink-182 (6). ” For me, Big Shiny Tunes was a milestone, a guarantee of success, says Sam Roberts, as he takes a look at his still-packed compilations. It indicated that you were on the right path, as if, at the time, you were covering the See or from Hour Magazine. To know that one of your songs was included in the compilation, it was really to feel, “Hey, there’s something going on. It’s not just a dream; you are in the conversation. ” ”

Representativeness

When you go through the 351 songs in the series, the lack of representation of women, First Nations and Francophones is immediately obvious. ” Big Shiny Tunes aspired to a certain geographic diversity, but it is certainly not true to the extent of the alternative rock scene in Canada, regrets the musical columnist Mark Teo. The inclusion of the French language is a major omission. How can a compilation aspire to be a Canadian product by definition without including musicians who sing in one of our official languages? According to him, this failure reflects a larger “structural problem” in the Canadian industry. “A new version of BST should make a more global representation of Canadian life: cultures, languages, adds Sam Roberts. We are there, as a society. ”

The impact on artists

The royalties received by the artists were substantial, explains Sam Roberts. “You are launching your career, you need every penny to invest in the tours, in the infrastructure of the group. Money from Big Shiny Tunes allowed us to build an action fund for the rest of our career. “The singer’s first appearance dates back to 2002.” Brother downis the song that launched our career. Week to week, we saw the momentum in concert, and that was largely fueled by Big Shiny Tunes. The progress was steep. We never saw that again. »Mark Teo says that these are the checks linked to the presence of The Good In Everyone which partly enabled Sloan, a power pop group from Halifax, to finance the album Navy blues, in 1998. It is also thanks to BST, he specifies, if the spectators began to sing in chorus Rave + Drool at festivals where Ontario rockers from The Killjoys performed.

The end of an era

The boom in digital music consumption and the drop in album sales spelled the end of BST. “The way we listen to music has changed so much since 1996, and even since 2009,” says Mark Teo. Today, the vast majority use streaming services and playlists to discover new music, which, unless you’re interested in specific subcultures, makes compilations like BST largely sassy. The appeal today is often nostalgic or ironic. Sam Roberts nevertheless underlines the lack of common markers in the circulating musical “sea of ​​information”. ” Big Shiny Tunes, it wasn’t necessarily the best of music, but it gave a focus. Today there is a lot of noise. I would love to see that kind of curation in the scene. ”