Tucked beneath the CBC Vancouver newsroom is a labyrinth of brutalist caverns. Within the concrete walls reside the CBC Radio 3 team, a group committed to, as their slogan says, “Breaking New Sound”. Radio 3 is the entrepreneurial, Webby Award–winning, all-digital broadcaster whose content is available through an innovative online platform and via satellite radio. Their offices are a buzzing hive of web developers and designers, with Jonas Woost at the centre of it all.
An intriguing constellation of events led this young talent into CBC’s “Bunker”, as the space is affectionately known. Woost was headhunted to join the Radio 3 leadership in 2011 and has now also taken on the role of chief architect, product lead and executive producer of CBC Music—an exciting new online property from the public broadcaster’s Radio 3 team that promises to redefine how Canadians access and engage with CBC’s vast audio content.
Woost’s first foray into the music industry began in high school, shipping promotional CDs for independent record labels in his hometown of Hamburg, Germany. By 2001, he had moved to London and eventually began working with the renowned electric record label, Ministry of Sound, where he was responsible for liaising with the company’s worldwide syndication partners.
A few years later, he took on the role of head of music with the U.K.’s digital media darling, Last.fm. Their online service tracks music tastes and builds a social community for some 30 million users, providing valuable audio consumption analytics to the music industry. Woost was tasked with interfacing between the start-up and the labels, managing partnerships, acquiring content and leading marketing initiatives. In his four years with Last.fm, he secured licensing deals to acquire the rights to almost 5 million recordings.
During his tenure at Last.fm, Woost came to represent the youthful face of digital music and was swept into the conference circuit as a sought-after panelist on the changing nature of digital audio consumption. The industry was in a free fall and executives were, and still are, desperate for insight into how to fight content pirates and build business models around monetizing digital products. It was this specific challenge that brought him, and the media digerati, to Canada’s West Coast in search of answers.
The destination was the Transmission conference in Victoria, B.C., an annual invite-only global summit of industry luminaries that unfolds in an unusually participatory and open format, where interactive roundtables and inspirational presentations blur the line between participant and speaker. “Everyone is a panelist, everyone is in the audience,” Woost explains. “Transmission provides a platform that develops ideas and strategies around the monetization of digital content.”
Now the director of programming for Transmission, Woost sees a land of opportunity in B.C. He relocated here in 2010 not only to accept a position at the CBC, but also because he regards the province as being uniquely positioned. Accessible to Asia, and close to the Silicon Valley and the Seattle/Redmond area, Canada’s West Coast is becoming a significant digital media outpost. “It’s vital for those in the digital and creative industries to maintain relationships with those global centres and other major North American hubs,” he explains.
Last spring, Woost began leading the development, implementation, and launch of CBC Music. The unique new digital music platform has opened up the broadcaster’s vast digital libraries of Canadian content. “The Radio 3 platform allowed you to find a neo-punk band in Kamloops, learn more about them, hear their music and interact with them, leave comments, share their music, and find other artists in other communities that are similar,” Woost says. “With CBC Music, this experience is effectively rolled out into all communities across the CBC listenership, opening up our libraries of jazz, classical, and 12 other traditional genres that are currently underserved by private, mainstream media sources in Canada.” The initial response from listeners since the CBC Music service’s launch in February has been tremendous. In its first week alone, the system logged one million views, 200,000 unique visitors, and six hundred hours of music streamed.
It’s this kind of product passion and relentless focus on your audience that propels dynamic organizations past the graveyard of failed ventures. The challenge comes in securing leaders with the relevant experience, vision, and youthful persistence to redefine industries that might seem entrenched. For the CBC, securing Jonas Woost to usher in the digital renaissance for public radio in Canada was nothing short of a coup.
Photo: Grant Harder.
