POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
Today is a big day for CBC Radio 3, and we hope it’s also a big day for independent Canadian musicians and their fans. As you can see, we’ve done a HUGE revamping of the CBC Radio 3 website. This has been in the works for over a year and we’re really excited about all the new features that will help all of you showcase and discover new Canadian music more easily.
So what’s new?
- • Brand new look
- • Power To The People – the launch of personal pages for R3 Community Members
- • Unlimited personal playlists with drag & drop re-ordering
- • Share any song, playlist, or concert with your networks on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious
- • 4 New Streaming Radio Stations – Rock, Pop, Hip Hop, & Electronic
- • New Music Player with next / previous 5 tracks and song ratings
- • New R3-30 Chart widget to see the chart, playlist the chart, or add songs to your playlists
- • New CBC Radio 3 Snapcast to deepen our commitment to Canadian photography
- • Totally revamped Concert Calendar to find any gig across Canada in our system
These are the highlights – if you want to know more about what this new site offers and why we’ve done it this way, please keep reading…
NEW LOOK
First of all, the design has been revamped from head-to-toe. The goal was to showcase more of what CBC Radio 3 has to offer than just our blog and the streaming radio service. We found with our old design, many people didn’t know that all the music played on CBC Radio 3 has been uploaded by musicians and that there are over 18,000 artists and over 80,000 songs on the website to browse through, discover, and share with others.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
The biggest goal of the new site is to empower our community more effectively. We know that we can only do so much here at CBC Radio 3 (especially after last year’s budget cuts). We think we do a damn fine job with the resources we’ve got – streaming radio, blogs, podcasts, concerts, etc – but we know that we can never be everything to everyone.
So we want to make it easier for all of you to become music tastemakers yourselves on the site and to be able to share your own musical tastes with the rest of the community and/or your social networks. So everyone with a login account now has their own Member Page. You can put in a bio about yourself and your music interests, upload photos of yourself, link to your own website or twitter account, and most importantly, showcase your personal playlists and your favourite CBC Radio 3 artists. Every time you comment on the blog, your screen name will link to your profile page. We hope this is going to be the start of growing our community, letting all of you discover music through each other, and getting to know each other a little bit better.
Here’s how to set yourself up with a sweet profile
UNLIMITED PERSONAL PLAYLISTS
Since the day we launched personal playlists on the website several years ago, the number one request we've had has been, "This is awesome, but I want to make MORE than one playlist." We heard you. You can now make as many playlists as you want and save them. You can also drag and drop tracks within your playlists to re-order them in real time, and you can drag and drop tracks from one playlist into another. We think the playlist management area is one of the coolest new things on the site, so please check it out and let us know what you think. Just click on 'My Playlists' in the grey navigation on the left (Note: you have to be logged in to do this).
Here's everything you want to know about playlists
SOCIAL NETWORK SHARING
Every single piece of media on our website (and there’s a LOT of them) has its own permalink. We’ve created a URL-cruncher linked to the URL http://r3.ca and set up direct access to share our content out on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. So when you have a song, a playlist, a concert, or anything else you like on the site, just click on the envelope icon and send it off to your friends. When people click on the link from the external site, it will take them to the CBC Radio 3 website and automatically play the media that you’ve linked to. We really hope that this will empower all of you to join us in our mission to spread the word about new Canadian music far and wide.
NEW GENRE RADIO STREAMS
The main CBC Radio 3 station is a mix of several different types of music – rock, pop, hip-hop, alt-country, punk, electronic, etc. For us, it’s the best way to introduce all of you to a broad range of Canadian artists.We also realize that it would be pretty great to be able to listen to an all-electronic stream, an all-hip-hip stream, an all-rock stream, or an all-pop stream. So we created them.Each of the new stations goes deeper and has a larger music library than our main station. You’ll hear songs on these stations that you won’t hear elsewhere. We’re able to showcase more music by more musicians and provide all of you with more radio options to hopefully fit your personal tastes and moods more effectively.
To check out the new stations, just click on ‘web radio’ in the music player at the top of the page and choose the station you want to listen to. You can see what track is playing on each station in real time, too.
Here's a primer on the new web radio stations
NEW MUSIC PLAYER
Our music player used to be on the right hand side of the site and now it’s a permanent fixture on top of the site. Like the old player, it allows you to surf through the entire website and reload pages without interrupting your stream or playlist.
In 'web radio' mode, you can now see the 5 previous tracks that have played and the next 5 tracks that are coming up, complete with links to artist page, the ability to add tracks to your personal playlists, and the option to play any of the songs on demand.
Any song that is playing can be added to one of your personal playlists by hitting the '+' button. You can also rate any song you’re listening to (live or on-demand) by clicking on the thumbs up or thumbs down button. This information helps the CBC Radio 3 music team improve our programming for you.
You can also pop any of our live streams into an external media player of your choice (iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, etc) by clicking on the 'MP3 stream' button.
R3-30 CHART
For those who aren’t familiar with it, the R3-30 is our weekly chart of the top music we’re playing at CBC Radio 3. The only problem with the R3-30 on our previous website was that there wasn’t an easy place to see the full chart. Problem solved. On the front page of the site, there’s now an R3-30 widget that lists the top 30 tracks, provides links to every song, every artist page, let’s you add any track to your own playlists, and even favourite the entire playlist for repeat listening.
CONCERT CALENDAR
Last but not least, we've got a brand new version of our Concert Calendar. You can check out any show across Canada in our database at a glance, and you can sort by artist, city, venue, genre, etc with a single click. You can also refine your search in the 'filter' box and return only the results you want – ie: show me only concerts at the Horseshoe Tavern, or show me only concerts in Halifax.
We’ve got some screencasts here and a full guide to the new website to show you how all of this works, but if we’ve done our job right, hopefully you don’t need them J.
Finally, I would like to profusely thank the hugely talented and dedicated team that built this new version of cbcradio3.com. While EVERYONE at CBC Radio 3 contributed to this, there are five individuals I’d like to single out as chief contributors who have lived this project every day for a long time:
Ahmed Khalil designed the WHOLE thing and it was a monster challenge. It’s gorgeous, functional, and easy to use.
Scott Muc and Phil Rabin coded the WHOLE thing, including building new media players and inventing things for this site that didn’t exist before. GENIUSES. Seriously.
Rahim Lalani for creating a killer way to make new web radio stations, figuring out the social media sharing components, and a vast array of other technical solutions that I can’t even pretend to understand.
Nicole Goodman for managing this huge and complex project through to a successful completion. It was a doozy!
Please dive in, explore, and give us feedback. We’re all extremely
excited about the ways this new site will help further our goals of
showcasing new Canadian music to the world and helping all of you
discover, enjoy, and share new Canadian music more easily.
We’d sincerely love to know what you think, so fire away in the comments or drop us a line at feedback@cbcradio3.com.
WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT IN THE NEW SITE?
Thanks for all your continued support of CBC Radio 3 and independent Canadian music.
Steve Pratt
Director,
CBC Radio 3 & CBC Digital Music
