The bleh 2

I was saving this post for some report on my Cocoa progress, but instead I feel like I should add my voice to the many that have commented on the new CBC Radio 2, which launched yesterday. I have to admit that I had missed the announce of the changes to come from a few months ago, so I only noticed that something was coming up over the week-end. Since the start of September is a common time for program changes on Radio (or TV) I wasn't too surprise ... but I wasn't really expecting the only radio I have been listening to since I moved to Canada 5 years ago, to change so much ... and not for the best, sadly.

So what happened you may ask? Well ... to sum-up, Radio 2 which use to be mainly Classical and Jazz, got stuffed with a large part of the Radio 3 playlists. Now don't get me wrong, there nothing wrong with Radio 3, in fact I have enjoyed it since the very first podcast of Grant Lawrence back in 2005, and I was also very disappointed when the fun take-over of Radio 2 airwaves by Radio 3 was terminated over a year ago (Saturday nights).

What's wrong then with Radio 3 taking over Radio 2? Simply put: wrong crowd, wrong time. Let's face it, the large majority of Radio 2's audience isn't the kind that will enjoy The New Pornographers at 7 in the morning ... I can understand that they will have wanted to expose the listeners to some of the new Canadian music, but a better approach will have been, IMHO, to bring minor tweaks to the programing by adding a single show composed of the usual Radio 3 playlist (e.g by shortening Canada Live) ... one hour will have been enough. In fact, the old Radio 3 show on Radio 2 (which I talked about earlier) was perfect to get folks introduced to the new Canadian music tree. Instead, we have 7 hours of it, and Radio 2 now just sounds like any other FM radios ... minus the ads that is.

At least, we still have The Signal ...