Licensing

Blog­a­rithms points to a tuto­r­ial on music licens­ing at How­Stuff­Works. Inter­est­ing, but I’m still stuck with my ini­tial thought; it’s just too damn hard to deal with. This, of course, has been the case pretty much for ever. My point is, now that pod­cast­ing is tak­ing off, it will become a much big­ger prob­lem. Once again, peo­ple of the net is play­ing with tools get­ting them what they want how they want it when they want it — and just as with MP3s, I doubt any­one will stop to wait for the major record com­pa­nies to get their act together and give up their old skool approach to licenses. When they don’t want to deliver what peo­ple are ask­ing, I can’t blame any­one for think­ing that…well.… screw ‘em.

Just as we saw it with weblogs, the new infra­struc­ture allow­ing for easy dis­tri­b­u­tion will drive the deliv­ery of inter­est­ing con­tent and while we are defi­nately up for some qual­ity indie talk radio, I expect to see quite a lot of good music shows out there too — and a lot of angry let­ters from record companies.

Bot­tom­line: Once again, the major play­ers are going to learn it the hard way, so in short they’ll just have to act pretty damn soon if they want a pice of the action. Right now, most peo­ple out there would love to do this legally. Once they decide to play hard­ball with­out offer­ing any decent alter­na­tives, most peo­ple will just go ahead and to their thing any­way — and they won’t have a hard time explain­ing to the pub­lic why they do what they do event though it’s not legal.

I think I’m going to get myself a radioSHARK. FM timeshift­ing com­ing up. For now I’ll prob­a­bly won’t get in trou­ble as I don’t really have a radio show lined up.