AP 0831: If I Credit the Author of the Music, Can I Add Their Songs to My Podcast?

AskPat 831 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 831 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from Dave.

But before we get to his question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is Design Crowd. It's a website that has over a half million designers worldwide to help you design and develop your logo, your website, or business cards. It's really cool because no matter what kind of business you have you can get a perfect custom design every single time or your money back. Check out DesignCrowd.com/AskPat to learn more and download your free guide to crowdsourcing great logos, graphics and websites for your business. You can get $100 off your next design when you enter the promo code, “AskPat.”

Right, now here's today's question from Dave.

Dave: I'm thinking about starting my own podcast. I'm going to pay somebody on Fiverr to do my voice over work to do the introduction, as well as someone to do an original bit of music to blend in with that. But at the end of my podcast I was thinking about adding my favorite song of the week, giving the artist and the title of the song, and possibly the CD that it came off of, and then playing a snippet of the song or the whole song.

Now, would that be a copyright problem because I'm not profiting for it, and it's going to be a different song every week. Or would have to give them links to iTunes or Amazon where they could purchase the CD or the song?

Pat Flynn: What's up Dave? Thank you so much for the question. To answer it really quickly, no you can't and shouldn't us other people's music in your show, even if you were to give them credit, even if you were to offer a link, even if you only use a little bit of that copyrighted song and give the performer credit. You're still violating copyright if you don't have a license or other permission to use the music.

That's what you'd have to do. If you really, really wanted to do this it's going to be a headache because there's going to be so much involved, plus a lot of legal fees and maybe licensing fees and those kinds of things. It wouldn't be worth it in my opinion.

You can't even reach out to the musician. You can't even really have them tell you over Twitter, “Yeah, go ahead and do it,” because you need formal licensing because they could change their mind or somebody, their manager or agent or whoever. Typically there's a larger body at work in terms of who says it's okay to use music and not.

I remember working with something similar in marching band. We wanted to write music that was for some of the major pop songs that were happening at the time, and we had to go through a lot of red tape and hoops to make that happen. A lot of calls had to be made and money had to be paid in order for us to write and score our own music that was popular pop songs at the time that we could then play in the band.

It wasn't even the same song because it was done with instruments, and we still had to go through that process. Obviously a podcast is a little bit different and there was opportunities for the marching band to be featured on TV and us playing the song, so yeah I get it but still, it's not worth it. You could say what the song of the month or week is and that's okay, but playing it and actually using they copyrighted material in there, it's not going to work.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Well they do this on YouTube.” People create YouTube videos all the time and they put their music in their, and then you'll see a link to the music and that's okay. It's still not okay. Actually I've done that before where I've created videos and I've had music from other things in there. What always happens is you'll get a nice letter from YouTube saying that you violated a copyright, but that the musician or artist if they are okay with it … Sometimes they're not and they'll just say, “Take the video down,” and they have it automatically set to do that.

Sometimes you create videos and they have them and your video will automatically be taken down. Other times it may not be shown in certain countries, which limits its reach. Other times it will tell you, “You're still in copyright but artist has allowed this link to be placed on your … Or this advertisement to be placed on top of your video, or next to your video for the song,” or things like that.

It's just a mess. I would not even worry about it. The reason YouTube does it that way is because it's YouTube and there's billions of videos being put up and it's impossible for them to do it and police it in that way. They've worked with those artists directly to make it happen and compromise for them. But for you and your podcast definitely don't do it.

I wouldn't even worry about it, you can just say, “This is my favorite song of the week,” and people can go and find it if they want. That's what I would recommend. Dave hopefully that answers your question. Thank you so much for sending it in. I appreciate you and I want to send you an Ask Pat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the day, by Thomas Carlyle. “The true university these days is a collection of books.” Hear, hear. Take care, I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.