In the last post on CBC funding and Radio 3 I said that it would be foolish for the CBC to axe Radio 3. Radio 3 appeals to a segment of the population where the CBC has little other appeal. Radio 3 is the CBC's primary presence for those who place the internet at the center of their media - people who practice and understand social media. The results of my efforts so far fully bear this out. On February 25 I launched an online campaign to urge parliament to increase the CBCs funding. The following day I launched a second one to urge the CBC to keep Radio 3. The results so far are very telling 689 people have so far signed up to help increase the CBC's funding and 1,144 have signed up to save Radio 3 so, in online communities there are more people willing to support Radio 3 than the CBC as a whole. The Radio 3 supporters have also done more 'passing it on' there are still 3,121 open invitations to the Radio 3 group compared to 1,853 for the CBC funding group.
Online communities are more involved and proactive than communities that form around more traditional media and online communities represent the future audience for all media. The numbers above, I think, represent what killing Radio 3 would imply for the CBC's future audience. Hopefully Parliament will do something to help the CBC through the current economic crisis and hopefully the CBC will think twice before doing anything to Radio 3. What they decide to do though will be a clear statement of how the CBC feels about it's online audience and how it feels about it's own future.
3 comments:
Well said. CBC Radio 3 attracts a younger audience that otherwise might not pay attention to the CBC as a whole. Cut it, and you cut an entire generation of users who could have been a loyal-- and active-- audience well into the future.
I'd note that in certain other venues I'm seeing a real misunderstanding of what CBC Radio 3 is. Numerous commenters in mainstream media venues have suggested that the CBC *should* cut R3 loose, because it's offering a service that private broadcasters already offer. Needless to say, that's a crock: for every twenty artists in the R3 playlist, maybe one of them is actually getting any airplay anywhere else besides the CBC.
And people don't realize: CBC Radio 3 has created what may be the single largest virtual library of Canadian music - and it's not just "kids stuff": there's a wide range of artists represented on the site in the folk, jazz, blues and other "post-popular" realms. To dispense with that alone would be an act of criminal negligence
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