Alligator & Podcasting

My first real post here at Bandana Blues will be a open letter to Bruce Iglauer, CEO of Alligator Records, concerning Podcasting in general and specifically, Bandana Blues with Beardo & Spinner. I encourage your comments. They will be periodically forwarded to Bruce at regular intervals.

In the past few months I've had a short conversation and e-mail correspondence with Bruce about Alligator material being used on podcasts and his take on the whole situation. Here is my e-mail to him:

Gentlemen,

Just checking to see what your current state of mind is regarding podcasting. Till there is a definite legal template to follow, podcasters are blazing their own trails. Bandana Blues has been broadcasting on the internet in one form or another since 1999 and now enjoying a substantial audience worldwide due to the creation of RSS feeds and XML. I have been promoting the blues as a vital living music, not a spent genre like it was my job for decades. Let me help bring new people into the fold.

If you care to give me some guidelines on using Alligator material, I'm all ears.

Here is his repeated stance:

Hi Beardo

Here are the problems I have with podcasting in a nutshell

--it isn't covered under any kind of royalties. Songwriters and publishers are not getting paid through BMI or ASCAP, and labels and artists are not getting paid through Sound Exchange.

--it's not very hard (and getting easier) for individuals to lift songs out of a podcast and store them, which makes it another way that the music is being given away against the wishes of the creators of the music.

If this is 'blazing their own trails,' it doesn't seem like anyone wins except the podcasters.

If there were a royalty scheme, I'd be interested. For now, the only way that I can see it benefiting anyone is if a podcaster is willing to play partial songs rather than full length. What do you think about that?

Best

Bruce

The solution is a complex issue that seems to need a mediator to digest and suggest solutions. Here is your chance people. What would be fair compensation to the artist, the author, the publisher and the record company? How would you determine the scale or % for each and what revenue do you base it?

Do you podcast in a reduced bitrate to lessen the quality thereby discouraging a napster-like situation, which is much more difficult as the podcast is a single file that would already discourage most would-be pirates, not a peer to peer file sharing environment. Add to that a monaural broadcast perhaps?

I would reluctantly agree to NOT play any Alligator material, if that is your wish. As Alligator is providing Cds to another blues podcast for "airplay", I would find that request to be a bit strange.

At Bandana Blues we try to overlap or talk over the beginning or end of a song much like the annoying DJ's of the sixties on AM. Are you old enough to remember waiting for the guitar solo by Jorma Kaukonen at the end of White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane only to have it buried by the big reverby voice telling you it was the psychedelic sounds from San Francisco and then the canned jingle with stations call letters in a sing songy style by a mostly female chorus? We try to be gentle and unobtrusive.

Finally, despite the wide variety of opinions on copyright infringement and the various definitions of podcasting, the consensus across the industry seems to be that there must be one set of rules that everyone can follow and enforce. Without that, and with the quick development and release of new technologies, the only thing we can be sure of is uncertainty and confusion.

So, where do we start?

Beardo