CBC Launches New Digital Music Service

CBC has launched a new digital music service allowing listeners to stream CBC Music to their iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, including 40 web radio stations, and 2 Live stations:  Cbc Radio 2, and CBC Radio 3.

Listeners can also listen via the web at cbcmusic.ca and also have access to OnDemand music. The OnDemand features 7 artists at the time of writing so hopefully this grows.

Key features of CBC Music include:

• Completely free, and easy to navigate – just click to play
• 40 web radio stations built from a library of millions of tracks of music
• 14 genre-based music communities ranging from rock to classical, pop to jazz, hip hop to country, and everything in between
• CBC Radio 2 & CBC Radio 3
• Direct access to the music of almost 1,000 major and independent music companies
• Artist pages on more than 25,000 independent artists with thousands of songs you can play whenever you want
• The best music content from a variety of CBC programs including Q and George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight
• CBC personalities who guide Canadians through the infinite world of music
• Hundreds of concerts available on demand
• Original content including articles, blogs and playlists, updated daily
• ‘The Canadian Concert Calendar’ maintained by artists – one of the largest Canadian concert calendars available

Is this the Canadian version of Pandora? Not quite, but definetely a start in the right direction for Cbc.  Canadians have many other streaming options available including Rdio which is onDemand, but the difference in service is the fact that Cbc Music is free. There are no options for a premium service at this time. 

After listening to a single Drake track, my data usage was just over 3MB for the duration, which would indicate the streaming is full mp3 quality. If you have a scaled down data plan,  you may want to keep an eye on your usage are there are currently no options to control the streaming quality.

Heres a few quick screens from the iOS version of CBC Music which can be downloaded from the appstore.

Source:  Broadcaster