I ran across a podcast by Tom Jeffries in Vancouver, BC, who talked at length about his attempt to get a license to play Canadian music on his podcast...and the absurd amount of money the license organizations are asking. BlogMatrix - Weblog. It seems as if no one in the music industry wants podcasters to include music.

Doesn't it make sense that if a small podcast plays a few songs that if the listener who happens to stumble across it might actually like it and buy it? The record folks seems to be afraid that the podcast will actually prevent that, because - hey, they already have a copy of the song on the podcast, so why would they buy it?

Ridiculous! Most podcasts go out at very low quality; 32 or 64kbps sample rate, much below CD quality. Also, many of the podcasters will talk over the beginning or end of the song, so saving that snippet will mean saving the talk, too.

And finally, the average podcast listener probably does NOT have audio editing software, so would be unable to edit out that particular song. And if they did, chances are slim that it would happen. I DO have the software and the capability to edit out songs and save them, but so far haven't found anything compelling enough to save at such a low bit rate. Why bother? The sound quality sucks. Podcasts are generally made to be listened to once, and then discarde, like the average radio show. If you like the song, you'll go pay the 99 cents at iTunes, or go searching for the album.

It's a no-brainer, and record executives and the RIAA apparently have no brains.