WTF?

I was listening to Coverville on the treadmill this morning (the killer app for podcasting) and heard that a woman named Melody from ASCAP called the guy who makes Coverville and told him he had to take down his song listings for each show from his web site, which he did.

Now I really don't understand this one.  How does this protect the artists that ASCAP is supposed to be protecting?  If I see that there is a band I like covering another band I like, I'll be a lot more likely to download and listen to the podcast which leads to more royalties for the band since Coverville is a BMI licensed webcaster.

Coverville still includes the track listings in the "get info" metadata on the MP3 file.  But this is not artist friendly and I don't like it one bit.

Comments

[G]

I think he can post the playlist after the show has aired but ancient ASCAP rules prevent the posting of a playlist BEFORE the show. I believe this is to prevent people from seeing a song they would like to record in advance and recording it...makes a whole lot of sense with a downloadable file, doesn't it? In general, entertainment/media needs to understand the internets are leaving them behind.

[Joe Taylor Jr.]

My clients and I have been debating this one -- it's a huge gray area because ASCAP is starting to enforce this rule even for artists who have issued songs under CC licenses. The idea is that you can publish a podcast that listeners enjoy "on demand." (That, in itself, is a huge shift in thinking for professional rights organizations.) But you can't publish or promote the names of those songs in any way that would imply that it's easy to store or archive them. For our own podcasts, we've started to require artists to grant us a waiver that supercedes the any agreements with P.R.O.'s for this very reason. Crazy, crazy stuff.

What's going to frustrate podcasters and listeners is that most of these rules were hammered out years ago when webcasters battled over streaming rights. A lot of folks are going to want to open dialogues that, as far as rights organizations are concerned, were closed out long ago.

[jeff]

Why your podcast is probably illegal:
http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/2005/03/silicon_valley__1.html