CBC youth music upload site proves more popular than producers expected

CBC Radio Three, the public broadcaster’s Internet initiative for youth, is contemplating expanding its unexpectedly successful newmusicanada.com channel beyond its current youth-market genres. The site accepts MP3 format music from Canadian bands, and with over 1,000 groups having uploaded tracks as of last week, the CBC’s Robert Ouimet says the formula may work for other types of music besides the urban, rock, and alt music currently featured on the site. The channel, one of two added to the Radio Three roster late last year to bolster the existing 120seconds.com (CNM, July 12/00) as well as the new justconcerts.com, has recently won an international EMMA award for its outstanding presentation of digital content. Ouimet, the project’s manager, calls the site a "sleeper" because it has been the least expensive to build and maintain of the three Radio Three channels. Besides an interactive web site that allows users to search almost 10,000 tracks by genre and location, newmusiccanada was also spun into a late-Saturday-night radio show on CBC Radio Two. "There’s a ton of people making stuff out there and they have very few outlets for their material," Ouimet tells CNM. "These bands – there’s nobody playing their music out there, other than maybe college radio stations in a very spotty way. The interesting thing for me is that once they started hearing about the site, they started telling their friends, and their friends started telling their friends...I don’t think we spent more than $2,000 advertising newmusiccanada in the last year." With the formula now proven, according to Ouimet, he’s investigating other genres of music that might benefit from the same type of exposure. He is currently researching those, and considering a pitch to either the CBC or others to recreate the site’s success. He says, though, that the CBC represents one of the best avenues for this type of project. "There’s a couple of things that work for us," Ouimet explains. "One of them is that we don’t really have a business agenda. We’re not trying to leverage their stuff to gain anything… Our goal, as part of our mandate, is to be a part of that community and expose the music. The other thing is we don’t force (the bands) into a mould. They can be whatever they are. We’re not commercial." As a non-commercial entity, newmusiccanada is also able to leave ownership of the tracks in the artists’ hands. Radio play is compensated according to standard agreements, though bands sign waivers giving the CBC the right to stream music over the Internet without payment. Ouimet points out that the music can’t be downloaded – a contentious model at the project’s outset. He says CBC execs doubted people would visit the site unless they could download, but he says the average stay on the property is 35 minutes – almost unheard of in the industry. Ouimet says the push to stream and not download music is just one of many issues the CBC has had to deal with as it grapples with new challenges posed by the web. While he has been involved in many of the CBC’s early web initiatives, he says executives at the broadcaster are just beginning to familiarize themselves with how the Internet differs from radio. Different language "They don’t live and breathe it. It’s not their primary media. We don’t have a common language. It’s a little like being bilingual. They’re translating what I’m saying into radio-speak." That’s changed, however. He says the CBC is not only embracing web activities, but its traditional radio activities are now being informed by the Internet. He points to collaboration between the more passive and the interactive sides of the business for creating new ways of storytelling as radio producers become involved in the web side to create interactive stories.

CBC youth music upload site proves more popular than producers expected

Broadcast | December 21, 2001

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