I remember when you went through Halifax back in the early eighties, and I remember the posters being up. So I was involved at that point.
What drew me to CKDU in Halifax was that I couldn't get jazz anywhere. I couldn't even get rock music anywhere. That's a role that community radio has played since the 1970s. People hear a band they like, and because they have a program, they have a power to put that on the air. It's that risk-taking that allows new talent to be discovered.
When I was at CKDU in Halifax, Sarah McLachlan was in her first concert with her first band, which was this techno pop band. We promoted it at the radio station. We incubated her career, we incubated Sloan's career, and there are stories all across Canada of that happening. And it continues to happen.
Community radio and campus radio continue to have a very strong role in that area because we still have a very substantial audience compared to the high level of fragmentation on MySpace and these other sites.
That doesn't mean we're not doing more new media things, because we are. We want to do new music podcasting, audio on demand for all of our audiences, and just make that material available more widely in formats that people want to see.
But there's nothing like having a physical space where you can go and take your CD and say “Check this out. I did this.” It's probably going to get played and someone's going to comment on it; and from that, careers are born.