Funferal

Copyright licensing for music in podcasts

The MCPS and PRS in the United Kingdom have just launched a licensing scheme for music in podcasts. Interestingly, it allows non-DRM’d podcasts, but only if the first and last 10 seconds of the track are obscured with speech or a station ID. That’s a long fade. It also appears that cross-fading between tracks might not count. And what, I wonder, about tracks where the lyrics at the very start are of the essence?
Further, music must not consist of more than 80% of the podcast, and individual podcasts must last at least 15 minutes each. For many podcasts – other than those focused on music – that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. There are various other requirements, most of which seem not overly burdensome. The one that could be problematic is that podcasters must not produce podcasts that contain recordings from a single artist or that have more than 30% of the musical works written by the same composer or writing partnership. While this would allow tribute shows to some artists, it could cause problems for those who pay more attention to artists than composers. Further, what if you’ve got fewer than three tracks in your podcast? (I really hope they got that situation covered).
So, the restrictions are a bit of a mixed bag. Which brings us to the cost:

The greater of 12% of gross revenue or the minimum fee per track downloaded as part of the podcast: full-track 1.5p; half-track (less than 50% by duration) 0.75p.

By my reckoning, if you’ve a half-hour podcast, with 24 minutes of music, averaging 4 minutes per track, that works out at 9p (sterling) per copy downloaded. A small audience of 100 people would be affordable (£9 per edition) but scale up much above that and it becomes expensive very fast, without necessarily entering commercially viable territory, while probably heading out of the possible listener supported range.
The good news, it would seem, is that these license agreements are really themselves situated in a global market (since the various agencies represent each other’s artists in their own territories) so 1.5p per track would appear to be the upper limit of such royalty costs. Whether it’s also the lower limit would depend, I suppose, on whether those licensing agencies act in a cartel-like fashion. And I can’t imagine that – can you?