The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

1 December 2006

Is this the future of radio?

With everybody defecting to satellite or shuffling their iPods, allegedly there's no audience left for good old FM, let alone even-older AM.

But wait:

I've been told, more than once, that the way around the copyright hassles involved with podcasts (basically, you can't play music from the big record companies — namely, most music you know — without [jumping through legal hoops] that are very much not in the lightweight-labor ad-hocky nature of what podcasters do) is to get a real (FCC licensed) radio station to play your podcast. Because they're allowed to play that music and you're not.

So, if you can get a friendly station to run your 'cast at 3am on a Sunday or whatever, you're set.

True?

San Francisco-based KYOU ("Open Source Radio") says that's exactly what they do:

If you’ve got a podcast that contains copyrighted music and a radio station decides to play it, it can be rebroadcast and, providing all DMCA rules are adhered to, it can be streamed as well. Since stations that play music pay all licensing fees (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC & SoundExchange) those fees will cover the music in the podcast.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with the fact that I finally got around to replacing my 31-year-old microphone last week.

Posted at 6:18 AM to Fileophile , Overmodulation


Video killed the radio star...

Posted by: Diane at 7:38 AM on 1 December 2006

Here's another idea whose time seemed inevitable. Open source radio. Brilliant.

Posted by: Mister Snitch! at 5:41 PM on 3 December 2006