[by Derek Slater] I’m a bit biased, because this is a topic I’ll be speaking on tomorrow. Search, recommendation systems, and consumer-to-consumer sharing are becoming central in online music marketing and discovery — and they were front and center in today’s I Am The DJ Panel.
Whether automated (like collaborative filtering) or consumer-based (like podcasting), these recommendation tools are critical in making consumers more able to draw on sources that better suit their music tastes. Panelists also highlighted how consumer-to-consumer taste sharing – like podcasting and mp3 blogs – is a creative, expressive act. Ali Partovi from Garageband.com noted that podcasters are artists; so, too, are the playlist publishers at Lucas Gonze’s Webjay.
Good for business, good for consumers, good for creativity. Or so it seems – the panel devolved into a muddled discussion of the legalities of podcasting. Do you need both a performance and a mechanical license from the publishers? Nashville podcaster Candace Corrigan pays a performance license to ASCAP and BMI, even though podcasts might not implicate performances at all. Garageband.com offers “podsafe,” licensed music, and Chris McDonald of Indiefeed is working on creating a podsafe manifesto to lay out the legal issues. Meanwhile, Corrigan suggested that perhaps there should be a way to make songs difficult for users to excerpt from a podcast.
I find these discussions incredibly frustrating. Instead of immediately considering how this might be illegal or how to make this safe and non-threatening, why aren’t we starting by talking about how to embrace and leverage this form of sharing? Maybe that means offering licenses, but it might just mean letting music fans engage the music they love in this way and in the process promoting those works. Lucas Gonze captured it nicely: “Everyone needs to agree that mp3 bloggers and podcasters have their hearts in the right place…. It’s a little sad that you can’t get permission.”
The Podcasting section is sponsored by Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference
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