Listen to this article
Estimated 6 minutes
The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.
This year was an interesting one for Canadian music.
In 2025, artists like Tate McRae, Justin Bieber and Drake found renewed success and dominated the charts. But the business side of the industry saw some low points too, with live music venues closing at an increasingly alarming rate.
Today on Commotion, Anishinaabe scholar and writer Riley Yesno, Montreal-based culture writer Erin Macleod and CBC Music associate producer Natalie Harmsen join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to reflect on the big albums, trends, and challenges that defined Canadian music in 2025.
We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today’s episode on YouTube:
Elamin: As we spent this entire year focusing on Canadian culture, do you find yourself and your listening habits a little bit different because of the annexation threats that we had sort of earlier this year? … How does that change what you listen to?
Riley: On a personal note, I think I tried more, perhaps, this year. I made an effort, for example, to listen to the Polaris longlist all the way through, which is something I’ve only ever done maybe once before.
Elamin: That’s a long longlist, my dude.
Riley: It’s a long list…. But I also think it’s harder, in a way, to support Canadian-made music than it is to do things like pick up a label at the grocery store and just check is it made in Canada. And part of this is due to the economic evolutions we’ve seen … where venues are closing down…. It’s very difficult for Canadian artists to tour this massive country. And I think that so much of what makes people, like, ride-or-die fans of music is seeing them live — being able to show up to a bar and just hear something that you haven’t heard before.
And if we’re seeing venues that … offer that service close down, then I think it’s no surprise to me that maybe more people are just like, “Well, I’m going to listen to whatever’s on the top 100,” right? And if we get some Canadians in there, we get some Canadians in there. So I think maybe “elbows up” hasn’t extended the same way to music that we thought it would…. It’s going to take something, I think, a little bit more deliberate on the part of the consumer in order to make that change.
Elamin: Natalie, part of the job in general for you at CBC Music is to promote Canadian songwriters and Canadian musicians. But that job must feel a little bit different in a year like this. How do you think all of this energy kind of boiled down to how you think about your job?
Natalie: I think for me personally, it feels like the stakes are a little bit higher because you just really want to fight the good fight for the incredible artists who are doing their job in this country….
In general, I try to always see a lot of local acts, but I think I was especially conscious of it in 2025. I mean, I saw Charlotte Day Wilson earlier this year. It was phenomenal. I go and see local jazz musicians at Listening Room Toronto. Shout out Listening Room Toronto…. I saw PUP earlier in the summer. So there’s just been so many great hometown acts that have had this moment. Even seeing The Beaches came back and played Scotiabank Arena, and they’ve had that crossover success this year. So I think that effort I have been putting in to personally show love to Canadian artists is really what has made it feel just a little bit more special this year.
Elamin: Erin, you wrote a big feature about all this recently… The headline was, “Amid Buy Canadian, Should We ‘Listen Canadian’ Too?” One of the things that you’re working through in that piece is that it’s a bit more complicated to say, “listen to Canadian music,” because there’s all different kinds of things that go into defining what “Canadian music” is. It’s not as simple as being like, “I will choose to listen to Tate McRae over Taylor Swift.”… Talk a little bit about what goes into this idea of “listen Canadian.”
Erin: I think what it means to listen to Canadian music is asking the question, how do we identify it? How do we categorize it? And it’s not as easy as, “let’s look for the maple symbol on the back of the CD,” you know?… How we define Canadian music is really quite fraught. When we say it’s important to listen to it in the face of … the language of annexation, let’s say, we have to be conscious of how all of these attempts at protectionism — like CanCon regulations, et cetera, the Quebec government’s types of protectionist measures — tend to risk putting Canadian music in a box. And that box often ends up looking very white, very male-devised, very cisgendered…. It’s a huge country with a huge variety of music, and so that is something that we need to think about, too.
You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Panel produced by Stuart Berman.