You Ask, I Answer: Sources of Music for Podcasts?

In today's episode, Jenna asks, where are some good sources of music for your podcast? Oh boy. Alright. First, I am not a lawyer. Let's get that out of the way.

I am not a lawyer. If you need legal advice, please seek a qualified attorney. Now let's talk about licensing. There's three kinds of music when it comes to podcasts. Number one is public domain music.

This is music for which there is no copyright. Uh and uh you are free to use that music as long as it is in the public domain. We're gonna come back to that in a second. The second type is what's called podsafe music. And this is music that you directly contact the musician, the artist, uh, for, and obtain written permission from them to use their music in your podcast.

Uh and you need to document that in case they ever do, for example, hit big and uh and then start issuing uh requests to people to stop playing the music, and you you have to adhere to their wishes, right? And then there's the third click category of music, which is everything else. There are two types of rights that you have to acquire for music. Um is what's called the performance rights, which is the right to play the music, and the second are called mechanical rights, which is the rights to play the recording of the music, and this is why public domain music can still be tricky sometimes, because in the performance rights cover essentially the the copyright of the music itself, and then the mechanical rights cover the playing of the music. When you go into a building's lobby and you hear you know music playing, that bit that building has to pay uh licenses.

If it's you know, Taylor Swift's new song, they have to pay for licenses to play that music for both the performance and the mechanical rights. When you do public domain music, the the performance rights are covered by it being in public domain. It's no longer um uh copyrighted, and therefore you don't have to pay for the performance rights. But if you're playing, say the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's rendition of that, you may still need to pay for mechanical rights. It will depend.

So that's the the catch there. And then the third kind, of course, is everything else. And for those uh other songs, anything else uh that it you would see like on YouTube music or Apple Music or whatever, you have to have a performance rights license. Typically you'll have to get one from each of the performance rights organizations, uh AskAP, BMI, and CSAC. So you need three licenses from them, and they run anywhere from two hundred to six hundred dollars a year.

Um, and then the mechanical rights from Harry Fox agency. All in, you will probably pay about a thousand dollars a year for those licenses and you have to report uh your usage of songs for uh each of those, I think quarterly. It was quarterly last time we did it. My company, uh way back in the early two thousands when I was running up a daily podcast, we had to to do uh reporting uh for those things. And so you have to p you have to send that in with that money in and it's an annual license, you have to renew it.

If you play music that is covered by a performance rights organization or a mechanical rights organization, you play it without permission, uh, on a podcast, uh, you can be sued and the fees are not inexpensive. Uh uh at another organization I was working at, they they had a little uh mix-up. And uh they got a sixty thousand dollar bill for p playing of thirty seconds of one song, right? So it's a pretty big deal. So where do you get your music from?

Go to the artist directly, if possible. And the other place that I've been using a ton, because it is uh the rights are cleared, is uh artificial intelligence generated music. So artificial intelligence is generating music. Now, is it gonna win any Grammys? No.

Uh i if you have a music podcast where you're trying to get people to to find new music, is it appropriate? No. But if you just need some background music for like transitions or in videos like this, then it's good enough. It's good enough and again check with the vendor that you're working with, but many vendors will if you pay the the appropriate level of licensing, actually give you the license, and then that music is copyrighted to you, to your organization, and no one else can use it. Uh the one vendor I've used a lot that uh has really good output is a company called Ava, uh AIVA, and uh it's not bad.

If you go to Ava.ai, it's the it's not bad. It's not great, right? It's not gonna win ya any Grammys, but it is in many cases good enough. There are no exceptions to the law. Um a lot of people have said, Well, you know, what about fair fair use?

Well, the problem with fair use is that uh you don't know whether you're gonna win in court or not, and going to court is very, very, very expensive. Uh your lawyer's gonna charge you, you know, three hundred, five hundred, eight hundred bucks an hour, um, just for you to not have to owe a whole a bunch of money. And if you do get caught, and it's real easy to get caught these days, um, you will run into issues, right? Uh even when you load stuff up to like YouTube, whatever, YouTube's uh AI-based algorithms in the back end are all checking to make sure that you're not uh using any copyrighted uh sound. And you'd be amazed at how good it is at detecting uh misuse of copyrights.

You do not want to be in the position. So to recap, pod safe music is your best bet because you will have in writing from the musician themselves both the performance rights and the mechanical rights covered. Yes, you may use my song that I play that I gave you this MP3 or WAV file for. Artificial intelligence generated music is also good. Uh if you if there's if you don't care about you know the the quality beyond uh uh being good enough.

Public domain music public domain music can be tricky if you don't secure both of the sets of rights. And then everything else, if you want to, and if you're a company, you should go secure the uh the rights. You can then play, if you have your licenses from ASCAP, BMI, CSAC, and Harry Fox, you can then play any song you want on your podcast. Uh you can play the latest you know, Taylor Swift song, and then when you report it to those uh agencies, what is beneficial is that they then take a percentage of the proceeds and give it to that artist. You say, you know, you got you know this many uh this many plays on this podcast, and you know they get like a tenth of a penny per play or whatever, but that benefits the musician.

So if you are using music by musicians, even if it's pod safe, check to make sure that the musician is um with is properly licensed. And if they are, do them a favor, get yourself the licenses, and then report in to say, like, hey, you know what I want to make sure that you're supported for your work, uh, that we you're that you're getting compensated for your work. Y if you have all those licenses, you can play whatever you want. Uh if you want to use uh songs from the latest uh movie by the rock, you can, because you'll be licensed for it appropriately. Do it right, and you will not have to deal with lawyers.

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