For the moment, CBC management appears to be onside. The show has been moved back an hour to attract and retain more drive-time listeners, and while recent corporation-wide cutbacks reduced the show’s team from six to three, there are no plans to retreat from the experiment to attract a demographic that commercial stations specializing in new music have long since given up on.
“When an artist emails us to say, ‘My iTunes sales have gone up so much because you guys are playing this song of mine,’ I love that,” says Parise. “Listeners say, ‘I’m spending all this money buying music again.’ It’s like there’s been a drought in which they decided not to buy music anymore.”
Terfry concurs, and then returns to work, sharing an in-studio, off-air chuckle about a listener who wrote in to say he recognized the samples in a song by — wait for it — a Vancouver hip hop group called Sweatshop Union.
