RADIO IS NOT DEAD. Obituaries for the broadcast medium have been written and re-written over the past 10, 20, 30 and even 40 years and, yet, it lives on.
Oddly, for CBC, facing budget cuts that some say may slowly starve it, coupled with the cultural malaise peculiar to Canada that prompts us to doubt many things produced in our country, radio is the Corporation’s biggest success.
It’s the ratings leader in many Canadian markets (Jian Ghomeshi’s Q gets better ratings that the legendary Peter Gzowski did). It provides local leadership but with a national focus. When talking to Canadian radio industry experts—many who won’t go on the record—almost all praise the smart, entertaining CBC Radio.
Plenty of consumers like it as well. Its share of listening is at historic high levels. Depending on the month and survey, Radio One sits at about 12% share of Canadian listening. In the late ’60s its share was under 5%, says Chris Boyce, executive director of radio and audio for CBC English Services.
“That’s a really interesting story because a couple of things have happened,” he says. “There are many more radio stations licensed in markets across the country than there were 40 years ago, and it’s a much more competitive media environment, in general. People have more entertainment and information options across the board. Yet, over that period, we’ve managed to grow the share of listening for Radio One fairly dramatically. So I think some of that is we provide something that is unlike anything else that exists in the market today.”
Radio One has broken audience records. Although it’s public-service driven not ratings driven, for the past five years, Metro Morning has been the top rated morning show in Toronto. And, according to PPM results in January, it captured a 20.1 share in the market for the first time. In fact, CBC Radio One also has the number one morning shows in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa and Halifax. Where CBC has a local programming presence, Canadians have forged a deeper emotional connection with the broadcaster, says Boyce.
There’s a perception that radio as a medium is losing its share of consumer’s attention to everything from TV to the Internet to all the other choices that are out there. In reality, tuning to radio in Canada hasn’t changed significantly in the last 20 years or so, especially to listeners over the age of 35. The under-35 demographic tunes less to terrestrial radio.
“From my point of view, that’s a huge opportunity to connect with people in those groups through digital platforms,” says Boyce.
When the CBC looks at where it wants to be, it comes down to thinking about the audience and what does the audience want and how it can connect with the audience, he says. “What’s happened in the last couple of years is the Internet has opened up so many new ways to connect with the audience that, today, I feel like there’s almost limitless opportunity. So for an industry that five or 10 years ago was sort of obsessed with whether radio would have a future, today I feel like I’m living in a world of infinite possibilities. The big question is how you best capitalize on them all?”
The success of its traditional radio programming is happening at the same time that it’s increasing its audience on digital platforms. The Corp.’s on-demand streaming of radio content in January, for example, is tracking about double what it was a year ago and every week there are more than 1.3 million CBC podcasts downloaded.
“We’ve found we’ve been able to grow audiences on digital platforms while not cannibalizing our traditional broadcast listening, which is helpful in terms of our mandate to serve as many Canadians as possible,” says Boyce.
Radio and digital are key to CBC’s five-year plan, 2015: Everyone, Every Way, as a way of reaching the six million or so Canadians who are either underserved or don’t have CBC service.
“The Internet also opens up whole different ways that you can connect with audiences that you never could on terrestrial radio,” says Boyce. “Some of that is the nature of it being interactive, two-way medium, and some of that is just an opportunity to create something that’s very different than what you could do on terrestrial radio.”
Last fall saw the launch of CBC Books, an online destination for Canadian book lovers that builds on the Corporation’s strengths in the area of books and literature. But it’s not just taking the audio content and sticking them on a site. “It’s creating an online digital experience about books that leverages the strength of all of those book properties, but puts the content in a form that makes sense for a digital audience,” says Boyce. “I think there are more opportunities to build services like that, as well as opportunities on the distribution side, which is sharing our radio programming, but in new ways, with the audience.”
In January, the Corporation announced a music licensing deal with the Audio-Video Licensing Agency (AVLA), allowing it to offer more of its radio programs online. AVLA, which represents major record labels and about 1,000 independent labels in Canada, was the last component of digital rights around music.
The AVLA deal allowed the Corporation to launch CBC Music, a free digital service that allows access to 40 music genre-based radio channels and blog posts, through both the web and mobile apps. (Although, music producers are now demanding more royalties from the CBC. At Canadian Music Week, CBC said it would sell advertising to sustain the free service.)
What sets CBC Radio apart and creates a point of difference is context. “We don’t just tell you about stuff; we help you understand it. We help curate in a world full of a ton of information. We help you sort through the music that’s out there and figure out what you actually want to listen to or discover,” says Boyce.
CBC Radio actually fulfills its mandate as a public broadcaster. Whether that remains possible with the federal budget cut, slashing $115 million over three years from the CBC, remains to be seen.
From 2008 to 2001, the radio budget was already cut by 20%, according to independent research company Canadian Media Research, and it will likely be cut further now.
“They wanted to get rid of radio in 1955,” says Wade Rowland, a professor in the faculty of communication and culture at York University in Toronto and author of several books. “Radio is not dead because it’s good. Private broadcasting doesn’t give the public what it wants. What’s the product produced by commercial broadcasters? They sell audiences to advertisers.”
What do you think? Let us know at editorial@cartt.ca — and watch for next week's analysis on what the CBC might/should/could do in the face of its $115 million federal government budget cut.
