Observations The CBC unveils fairly nifty new digital music service

Yesterday, CBC launched its new online music service, simply: CBC Music. And with much hurrah and white wine, the service was unveiled at one of the 10th-floor studios at CBC HQ; the was stage decked out with sleek black scaffolding dotted with oversized neon-blue PLAY buttons, and flanked by two “interactive bars” where those in attendance (mostly CBC employees, industry types, and some press) could check out the new website. Caterers ferried around wine, sparkling water, and miniature duck tacos while PR reps with headsets and clipboards made sure everyone was where they should be.

It’s tempting to say the room was electric, as all of these warm bodies hummed about what was being positioned as a “game changer” for digital music in Canada, were it not for the way all of that apparent electricity was being deliberately drummed up. The lights dimmed and CBC Radio 2 host Rich Terfry (a.k.a Buck 65) took the stage to set the whole thing in motion. “Despite my comfortable position on the inside,” Terfry began, “I consider myself a music fan first.” And, guess what? In all of his years as a music fan, CBC employee Rich Terfry has never seen anything quite like CBC Music!

The service itself is fairly novel, if not quite as revolutionary as everyone being paid to call it revolutionary was saying. CBC Music folds in a bunch of things the CBC does pretty well—music radio, artist interviews, and commentary—with some stuff it does not so well—like the CBC Radio 3 artist hub, which, like MySpace, seems more and more obsolete as Bandcamp pages being to spring up with increasing frequency. CBC Music offers 40 radio stations, and 14 “online communities” built around different genres and taste profiles, from classical to indie rock. These communities are curated by CBC staff and on-air personalities, to include editorial content like artist profiles and essays that are supposed to help users explore the music that interests them. The service is available online via your personal computer, as well as portably on your iPhone and iPad, with support for other mobile devices apparently in the works. As Chris Boyce, executive director of radio and audio for CBC English Services, put it when he took the stage, “We live in a musical universe of infinite choice.” CBC Music aims to winnow this choice for you.

Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of the site (or “service,” or whatever we’re supposed to call it) is the collection of artists pages. To a large extent, CBC Radio 3 has become synonymous with a certain strain of indie rock in Canada. But where CBC Radio 3 artists tend to fall into disrepair and obsoleting, Boyce says that CBC Music will take steps to ensure that this information is more up to date by tasking it to the site’s curators and webmasters rather than relying on the artists themselves. Given that CBC’s commitment to Canadian artists is both time-tested and mandated, CBC Music could work to improve how Canadians explore their own musical culture and heritage.

Otherwise? Well, like anything marked by buzzy talk of “communities,” “portals,” “content,” and other newspeak about “entering the digital age,” CBC Music’s hard-pitch seems a little fogeyish. Sites like CBC Music try to streamline the experience of the Internet itself, an experience which isn’t as daunting and phantasmagoric as people like Boyce, with his talk of the infinite, seem to suggest it is. Anyone with a decent high-speed Internet connection, a Torrent client, and a Google search bar (and, for the super-duper savvy, a Mediafire account) can already access pretty much any piece of recorded music they could want, however extralegally. And many of these links are already curated by music websites, from super-nichey genre-specific blogs to more culturally prominent tastemakers like Pitchfork (or, you know, The A.V. Club).

CBC Music seems to want to create a little mini-Internet within the Internet, where users can do all these things while remaining within the confines of CBC’s site architecture and banner ads. For casual music fans or oldsters who use the Internet at the public library and call it “the e-mail,” this may be fine. But for seasoned web crawlers and cyberspace surfers who already know their way around the World Wide Web, it seems superfluous. When the Internet has already made experts of everyone, do we really need our tastes in music vetted through Buck 65, Jian Ghomeshi, or whoever? CBC Music seems like one of those web services that’s interesting and valuable in theory, but will probably never be used by the hardcore music fans its depthless vaults of “content” seem to be trying to capture.

Then again, you’re paying for it. You might as well take it for a spin.