[stan_rogers]

I dunno. Brent [Bambury] would go through moods where there's be nothing but long-string ambient installations playing for a week or two at a time, and that could be really annoying. I preferred the weekend show out of Vancouver that occupied the same time slot on Friday and Saturday. In any case, yes, that music was royalty-paid through ASCAP/BMI who handled further details. That was true even if an indie musician dropped by that afternoon with a fresh basement-recorded cassette. Things were much simpler then...

[storm]

My recollection is that Patti Schmidt ran a more rigidly structured ship: 1 hour of broad and relatively palatable stuff, 1 hour artist profile, and then 2 hours of miscellanea, with the final hour often being the really out-there installation stuff. Even when that last hour was unlistenable chin-stroking stuff, though, I still greatly appreciated that a show that would play it existed on the dial.

But yes, things were much simpler then. The demise of BNW seems to have coincided with the transition to satellite / podcasts / streaming for the CBC, at which point I can only assume that navigating licensing issues got a great deal more difficult. Even the single archival clip of BNW that CBC offers for streaming, from 1984, bears the notice Due to copyright issues, there are no songs in this clip.. That's just dismal.