Making tracks in music

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That Canada's most famous music exports include whiny songstress Alanis Morissette and mushy-metal band Nickelback says more about us Americans than it does about Canada.

Truth is, Canada, with a population about one-tenth that of the U.S., is crawling with great young rock bands, heralded on music blogs and among the indie cognoscenti, and steadily gaining a worldwide audience.

"I started my blog a year-and-a-half ago thinking that I'd spend a lot of time listening to American bands, only to discover that there's more than enough Canadian music to occupy my time," says Matthew Pollesel, who maintains the music Web site iheartmusic.net.

Canadian rock bands hardly constitute a single scene, though they are confined, for the most part, to three far-flung cities -- Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Montreal, home to indie-rock bands such as the Stills, Sunset Rubdown, Wolf Parade and American critical favorites Arcade Fire, is the current hotbed; yet Toronto still boasts Broken Social Scene, Stars and Metric (whose frontwoman, Emily Haines, headlined at the 9:30 Club earlier this week), while Vancouver claims New Pornographers and Destroyer, which share the singer-songwriter Dan Bejar.

If the blogging collective at mockingmusic.blogspot.com has anything to say on the matter, underdog capital city Ottawa will be Canada's next major buzz-generator. For his part, Mr. Pollesel, who blogs from Ottawa, says Toronto's Tokyo Police Club and Spiral Beach are poised for breakthroughs this year.

The success of these bands owes much to grass-roots support, but also to a somewhat contradictory policy environment that blends restrictive old-media content regulations with the frontier spirit of the Internet.

Canada offers several carrots to fledgling artists. There are taxpayer subsidies from the Canada Council, while the privately funded Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records (FACTOR) also dispenses cash grants to rock bands. Moreover, the Canadian government mandates that radio stations broadcast a minimum of 35 percent homegrown music.

Yet Mr. Pollesel cautions that the value of such regulations is far from clear. The Canadian-content rule does little to expose radio audiences to new bands and, indeed, has been "almost completely irrelevant" to the country's exploding indie-rock output, he says.

"The only bands that benefit from content regulations are those that are fit for mass consumption, like Nickelback, Avril Lavigne and Sum 41," Mr. Pollesel contends.