Jay Currie

CBC’s classical music station, Radio Two, is revamping its evening and late-night programming in a bid to attract younger listeners, the public broadcaster announced Wednesday.“Half of our audience on Radio Two now is over 65 . . . and we’re not attracting new listeners into the service,” said Jane Chalmers, vice-president of CBC Radio.

“We want to bring in the 40-plus kind of group. In some ways, it’s our listeners’ kids that we want.” globe and mail

I’m a lot less than 65 and over 40. I like classical music and jazz. What this lineup seems to be doing is largely eliminating classical music from the CBC’s “classical music station”.

Ms. Chalmers said the changes are designed, in part, to better reflect the makeup of the country.

“The growth in Canada now is happening through immigration. We’re seeing people move to different parts of the country, they want to hear more music coming from the communities that they live in,” she said, referring to the new program of live concerts across Canada. globe and mail

It is quite possible that these changes reflect the sort of incoherence that Ms. Chalmers quote above suggests. Or maybe they really think the CBC’s mandate is to chase the Chinese listeners and the Ethiopian listeners and the Urdu speakers where ever they may lurk. But if that is to be done by canning the classical nature of CBC-2 it is just another reason to axe funding to the CBC at large and switch to iPods, downloads and streaming audio.

What the CBC still has not figured out is that they no longer have a God given spot on the only radio dial in town. Nor have they figured out that the reason why they can’t get the younder audience is that audience has migrated, en masse, to the net.

The poor CBC is looking more dinosaurish by the hour,