It's a Beauty!

February 13, 2012 2:07 PM

Looking for Don Cherry's playlist, you say? No problem, eh. The Mother Corporation's brand new digital audio service has been launched by the CBC today, and is available here.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy (37 comments total)

SPOILER ALERT: Anne Murray is not on Anne Murray's playlist.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:10 PM on February 13

I'm surprised Don Cherry can hear any music over his suits.
posted by clorox at 2:11 PM on February 13 [13 favorites]

god DAMMIT do I wish this was the real Don Cherry's playlist. it would be *awesome*.
posted by facetious at 2:13 PM on February 13 [5 favorites]

I think they should make this suit-wearing Don Cherry rename himself Donn Cherry or maybe Dawn Cherry or Don Cherie or something so there's no more confusion, because I go through this every single time.
posted by koeselitz at 2:15 PM on February 13 [3 favorites]

This is not the Don Cherry I was expecting. Not by a long shot.
posted by .kobayashi. at 2:25 PM on February 13

Yawn Cherry works for me.
posted by mannequito at 2:26 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

Ha ha, Americans! Look, a website you can't use! You can HAVE your Hulu! And your Pandora! And your Comedy Central! And your Daily Show! And your Colbert Nation! And your SNL! And your NBC! And your Last.fm! And your Amazon!

I'm listening to Don Cherry's playlist.
posted by bicyclefish at 2:28 PM on February 13 [11 favorites]

Ok, CBC, I really like you but if you are going to use public money for stuff like this at least release it for more than just the holiest of the holies (iPhone users).
posted by Cosine at 2:29 PM on February 13 [3 favorites]

You forgot Spotify.
posted by Keith Talent at 2:29 PM on February 13

Cool. Where's Ed Thigpen's?
posted by thelonius at 2:31 PM on February 13 [2 favorites]

Ha ha, Americans! Look, a website you can't use!.

Actually... it works for me without spoofing or a proxy.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 2:34 PM on February 13

Sorry, but I'm in the US and it works for me.
posted by cmoj at 2:34 PM on February 13

Ha ha, Americans! Look, a website you can't use!

I wondered if this would be the case when I found it. My vague understanding about why we Canadians can't get all that U.S. content is because the effort required to obtain Canadian licensing for such a relatively small market is deemed not worthwhile by those services. It seems likely to me that the CBC will be available to Americans, can a U.S. member confirm this?
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 2:36 PM on February 13

I'm looking for Sean Cullen
posted by KokuRyu at 2:37 PM on February 13 [2 favorites]

I wondered if this would be the case when I found it. My vague understanding about why we Canadians can't get all that U.S. content is because the effort required to obtain Canadian licensing for such a relatively small market is deemed not worthwhile by those services.

Licensing is also made difficult by the fact that Canadian copyright law is out of date.
posted by KokuRyu at 2:38 PM on February 13

Licensing is also made difficult by the fact that Canadian copyright law is out of date.
posted by Fizz at 2:43 PM on February 13

My understanding of why we can't get a lot of the US content is that Canadian broadcasters don't want free streaming to cut into their market. So it's The Comedy Network that makes it impossible for us to access any direct-linked Comedy Central clips, because they're afraid no one would watch their terrible programming if we could get the shows we actually want online.

Hint: They're right.
posted by Phire at 2:44 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

The iPhone app has a channel called "Complete Cohen." As in Leonard Cohen. As if he's a freaking genre unto himself or something.

I'm not trolling. I'm just bitter because there's no Lightfoot channel.
posted by Brodiggitty at 2:49 PM on February 13

Leonard Cohen is pretty awesome.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:03 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

As an absolute Cohenophile, an all-Cohen cover channel is only slightly more appealing to me than being waterboarded.

Actually -- let me think about that one some more...
posted by Capt. Renault at 3:28 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

As if he's a freaking genre unto himself or something.

There's also a Glenn Gould channel buried in the Classical menu. And Aboriginal is a genre, which is interesting, as it's so far sounded like singer-songwriter, country, french hip-hop, and now easy listening jazz. I wish I could say more, but the thing that says what artist is playing is broken, unlike on the old R3 site.

I don't know who decided to have the opening day front page highlight story be The Black Keys, the pride of Akron, Ohio, Not Canada, but that wasn't necessarily the best choice.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 3:28 PM on February 13

Licensing is also made difficult by the fact that Canadian copyright law is out of date.

Since you seem to be ignorant, very generally speaking, Canadians are allowed to download content - they just can't upload. Once again, very generally speaking, this is why we can't watch Hulu etc. in Canada.
posted by KokuRyu at 3:28 PM on February 13

Needs more piano.
posted by specialagentwebb at 3:38 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

Needs more piano

Needs more pocket trumpet.
 
posted by Herodios at 4:00 PM on February 13 [2 favorites]

I like the catchy name. Very Canadian. (I'm Canadian).
posted by Pathos Bill at 5:02 PM on February 13

I used to have a second-tier Rogers account with a 60gb monthly transfer limit. Suddenly it was shrunk to 2gb with a $5 charge for every gig over. So I went up a tier to get the comfort of 25gb a month with a $2 per gig overage. When I recently moved I got the same package at the new place, but it is now limited to 15gb a month. Now I worry again about how much I'm using, wonder if I'm going to blow the bank whenever I do a run on youtube and vimeo. So thanks for the subsidized free service, public broadcaster, but there's no way I can do streaming radio for regular listening anymore. This is probably true of many people in the country on Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, Shaw, Telus.
posted by TimTypeZed at 5:49 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

Ha ha, Americans! Look, a website you can't use!.

Actually... it works for me without spoofing or a proxy.

Well, fuck.
posted by bicyclefish at 5:59 PM on February 13

My understanding of why we can't get a lot of the US content is that Canadian broadcasters don't want free streaming to cut into their market.

This is true, but there's a more direct explanation: When a US network sells the rights to a show to another broadcaster, they do it teritorially. So The Comedy Network has the rights to distribute The Daily Show in Canada across all mediums; Comedy Central likely contractually can't stream it here at all. It's not their turf.
posted by bicyclefish at 6:05 PM on February 13

Where's the link to Sook Yin Lee's playlist?

That's all I've ever wanted.
posted by i_have_a_computer at 6:13 PM on February 13 [3 favorites]

So thanks for the subsidized free service, public broadcaster, but there's no way I can do streaming radio for regular listening anymore.

This is why the Flying Spaghetti Monster created TekSavvy.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 6:24 PM on February 13 [3 favorites]

The iPhone app has a channel called "Complete Cohen." As in Leonard Cohen. As if he's a freaking genre unto himself or something.

Give it time. With the way CBC Radio 3 has been fellating him of late, I'll expect an all Dan Mangan channel to debut by year's end.
posted by stannate at 7:23 PM on February 13

So thanks for the subsidized free service, public broadcaster, but there's no way I can do streaming radio for regular listening anymore.

It might not be available in your area, but Primus offers unlimited too.
posted by ashbury at 8:01 PM on February 13

Unimited streaming Primus? Someone's gonna run out of Pork Soda.
posted by idiopath at 9:38 PM on February 13

The hamburger train should be here any day now. Get ready to shake hands with beef.
posted by mannequito at 10:00 PM on February 13

Where's the link to Sook Yin Lee's playlist?

That's all I've ever wanted.

I tried finding her band (Bob's Your Uncle) in Radio 3 but no dice (too bad -- saw her play at a festival once playing the dijeridoo). Tried finding 5 Feminist minutes on the awesome National Film Board site sadly no sook yin dressed as a hotdog ... However she does have youtube stream:

http://www.youtube.com/user/sookyinlee/videos
posted by chapps at 12:49 AM on February 14

My vague understanding about why we Canadians can't get all that U.S. content is because the effort required to obtain Canadian licensing for such a relatively small market is deemed not worthwhile by those services.

Beware the “Canada is a small market myth” that took hold during the debate over the free-trade agreement. We aren’t small: 33 million is a pretty big market. Look at the populations in other countries where services like Spotify are already active.

Putting together what I’ve read in the press; the (non-privileged) information from my copyright lawyer, who is mostly a music lawyer and has done a lot of work on the topic of and for copyright collectives; and what I learned editing a report he wrote for the feds on copyright collectives, the root reasons that music-streaming services are rare in Canada are:

• proliferation of copyright collectives (literally dozens), some of which overlap and conflict
• attitude of such collectives that they are de facto monopolies serving themselves and can thus charge whatever they wish, as opposed to an attitude that listeners and customers are the ones being served
• unusually high reproduction fees and royalty rates, which collectives basically don’t want to budge on

You’ll recall that the iTunes Store came to Canada quite late and Steve himself mentioned “licensing” as an issue in one of his Stevenotes. You’ll note further that CBC Music launched only after they swung a deal with one of the collectives, AVLA.

There basically never is a straightforward two-sentence answer to any question about copyright. There certainly isn’t here.
posted by joeclark at 10:29 AM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Well now that this service has turned out to be wildly successful, guess who has their hands out?
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 9:20 PM on March 11