TORONTO – CBC Radio is gearing up for the final phase of its overhaul of CBC Radio 2, continuing the shift away from classical music to offer a range of musical styles that it hopes will appeal to a broader audience.
A few details were released this week of the programming changes scheduled to be introduced next September. They will turn Radio 2 into a “multi-dimensional” music service to reflect the “musical diversity” of the country, the CBC says.
Weekdays will still feature mostly classical music in the middle of the day, but both the morning and drive-home shows will have a different sound than what listeners have become accustomed to.
The morning show, from 6 to 10 a.m., will feature everything from classics to contemporary, instrumental and vocal, with at least 50 per cent Canadian content.
The 3 to 6 p.m. drive show will again spin mixed contemporary music, the CBC says, with an emphasis on vocal music, new artists and “new sounds”, and will boast 75 per cent Canadian content.
The best moment of the day for classical music fans will be during the 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. slot. These five hours will be loaded with disc and recorded performance classical music, and will “focus on presenting classical music in a way that speaks not only to those who know it, but also to those who are discovering it”, say CBC radio executives Richard Stursberg and Jennifer McGuire.
The CBC says the evolving Radio 2 format has been meeting with success and that audiences are responding positively to such new shows as Canada Live, In the Key of Charles and The Signal.
The fall will also bring three new web radio stations – a classical stream, a jazz stream, and a singer/songwriter stream.
The new shows will launch on Labour Day, and the CBC promises you’ll know all about it because it’s planning a marketing campaign “unprecedented in the history of CBC Radio”.
