You seem to be missing that the CBC buys One Big Library (APM), and thus isn't in the business of talking and negotiating with individual artists at all.

I'm not going to defend that kind of approach to radio - particularly not taxpayer funded radio which has the potential to have far more breadth and depth in its content than commercial radio - and I suspect it is a relatively new innovation, inflicted by the current clueless management at CBC.

Like many Canadians I still mourn the loss of the amazing Brave New Waves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_Waves), and there's no way that all or even most of the obscura that was being played on that show was in some giant pre-licensed library of music. I suppose that cancelling one-of-a-kind shows like that is an aid to 'getting greater efficiencies out of the content management pipeline' or some such nonsense.

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...

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.

Still- there's nothing really stopping an artist from getting a publishing company (for commercial deals), and joining a performing right society like BMI, ASCAP, etc... which takes care of licensing and such for radio.

I think the problem their is the cumbersome nature of going to individual artists and negotiating terms. The benefit of dealing with an agency is it speeds up the process and makes it easier to manage.