Big Shiny Tunes: The Rise & Fall of the Canadian Compilation Album

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Today’s video is a suggestion from one of my Canadian subs and it’s a trip down memory lane for myself and I’m sure some of you too..Today we’re going to talk about the most successful album compilation series in Canadian history. It was so successful, that if you are Canadian or lived in Canada and listened to music between 1996 and 2009 you probably took part in this cultural phenomenon.It was so popular there’s even a book written about it, and it’s cultural significance in Canada. Today, let’s talk about the rise and fall of Big Shiny Tunes.
Rather than having mtv when we were kids in Canada, we had our own version, much music. Much is still around, but it’s a sad shell of it’s former self much like mtv. Starting in 1996 Much Music would compile the year’s biggest rock hits into a compilation album that would be released right before Christmas as the perfect stocking stuffer. It was called big shiny tunes.. It was usually labeled in the press as being an album of alternative hits, but I think that’s a mischaracterization, it was really the year’s most popular rock songs - spanning multiple genres from whatever was poplar at the time, nu-metal, pop rock, punk, emo, post-hardcore and so forth
I first heard of Big Shiny tunes when I was in grade 6 that was the year big shiny tunes 2 came out. I grew up in small town Alberta for most of my life and in the lead up to pretty much every christmas my friends always talked about wanting the latest edition of Big Shiny Tunes. This is the commercial for the very first big shiny tunes from 1996.
What made Big Shiny Tunes culturally Canadian was that it would have your usual hits from American and British artists, but it also featured Canadian artists, some established and some who weren’t. To a lot of Canadians it made it seem like their own artists were on the same playing field as the likes of Radiohead, Marilyn Manson, Bush and No Doubt.
Author Mark Teo would publish a book in 2018 titled Shine: How a MuchMusic Compilation Came to Define Canadian Alternative Music and Sell a Zillion Copies. He would write, "for the hundreds of thousands of people who owned the album, it was a snapshot of us."
The origin of big shiny tunes has several beginnings Vice had on take, while CBC had it’s own while several other newspapers had their slightly different versions. So let me summarize it for you. According to CBC the idea for big shiny tunes came from a yearly Canadian compilation album called Dance Mix that debuted in 1990. A label called Quality Recordings put out Dance Mix and they were an entertainment company that put out music on behalf of american labels in canada. It was in 1997 Quality teamed up with Much Music to release a similar annual dance compilation record called Muchdance that ran for many years.Just as a sidenote for my canadian subs, you might remember you could hire much music to come do a muchdance party at your work function or school.
Anyways, getting back to the story, Quality Recordings according to CBC approached Much Music in the mid 90’s to do a similar spin off for alternative rock music since the dance mix albums were such a commercial hit. So that’s where the idea of partnering with the big labels came up. Another story is that EMI Canada approached MuchMusic to do a compilation album based on the NOW compilations that were a big hit in the UK.
Vice’s retelling of big shiny tunes had a slightly different series of events, which dated back to 1993, three years before the first iteration of the series came out. It start with a lawyer named Chris Harrs who worked for Universal Music Canada. By 1993 compilation albums were nothing new to record labels. They dated back to the 70’s and perhaps no company was better known for putting out these types of albums than K-Tel who put out genre specific compilations. You might remember some of their commercials, i mean this one was my personal favourite that i ca