Music Remains Sidelined from “Immense” Podcast Opportunities

For many years, people have wondered, “Why doesn’t Saving Country Music have a podcast?” Many other websites and members of the media have been podcasting for a decade or more, and it seems like a natural fit for a music outlet.
There actually is a podcast affiliated with Saving Country Music. It’s the Country History X podcast that you can find on most any podcast network. It was started in April of 2021, and recently was re-stared with new episodes. But that podcast is more about diving deep into specific country history topics as opposed to a more general podcast about the big music stories of the day.
The hesitancy to start a more general topics podcast over the years has been based on two primary reasons:
1) You can’t play music on podcasts without extremely laborious and often expensive licensing deals that make it prohibitive or impossible to pull off with any sort of efficiency or ease.
2) Too many colleagues have worked for years to build up a following for their podcast only to have it completely pulled, deleted, or the threat of such action jeopardizing its future, often for questionable reasons and little or no recourse. This happened with W.B. Walker’s Old Soul Radio Show, for example.
It all seemed to be a hassle not worth getting involved in. The idea was that when the music industry finally got around to implementing a reasonable way for podcasters to play songs or clips of songs in podcasts, then I’d dive head first into the format. After all, allowing an easy way for podcasts to promote tracks, albums, and performers while fairly compensating them for their art seems completely intuitive and well past due. It’s felt like only a matter of time before that transpires.
Yet here in 2024, we’re still waiting. Saving Country Music has been complaining about this for over a decade, and wrote a dedicated deep dive into the issue in 2020 when another important and popular podcast, The American Music Show, was shut down after 452 episodes. This is a problem that should have been solved 12-14 years ago, yet persists today.
During the massive CRS (Country Radio Seminar) in Nashville in late February, a partner from research company Sounds Profitable named Tom Webster talked about this very issue.
“The potential for music in podcasting is immense. Imagine podcasts that dissect classic albums track by track, that tell the stories behind iconic songs, or that explore the intricacies of musical genres from around the world. These aren’t just hypotheticals; there’s a real, pent-up demand for this content,” Tom Webster said.
The podcast takedown issue is especially prevalent on YouTube, despite it being one of the most popular places for music-based podcasts.
“Sounds Profitable has conducted research that shows music is significantly more popular among video podcast viewers than it is in the broader podcast listening audience,” Tom Webster continues. “This discrepancy isn’t due to a lack of interest but to a lack of supply, constrained by the current licensing framework … For the first time, more podcast listeners say that they have watched a podcast in the last 30 days than have listened to one. Yet, simply popping your pod on YouTube is likely to fail.”
Spotify now allows podcasters who use their format to place songs into podcasts. But this is only available on Spotify itself—meaning people who listen to podcasts on YouTube, Apple, Amazon, or anywhere else cannot hear or see these podcasts. You also have to play the entire song in a slot you designate Spotify to place the song in. This makes it entirely useless for a podcast that might want to only use a sample of a song, or talk over the intro or outtro of a song.
UPDATE: According to Spotify, this service will end in June of 2024.
The micro licensing of songs is something we have seen work very well recently on the Instagram format. Now anyone can take a clip of a song, and sync it up with a photo or video. It has opened up tremendous promotional opportunities for songs. And unlike TikTok, which is currently in a battle with Universal over the payouts and protections it extends to the massive label’s roster of artists, Instagram has a more reasonable and lucrative deal for creators.
Of course, artists are still only earning penny fractions each time a clip is used, but it’s the promotional factor that at scale can result in incredible uplift for a track or artist that ultimately translates into streams, downloads, physical purchases, and concert sales for an artist whose track gains popularity, or goes viral on the format. Instagram has quickly become one of the best formats for sharing and networking in music since MySpace.
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But in part to insulate Saving Country Music from the onset of AI-generated audio versions of articles, and to at least plant the seed of a future podcast when music licensing comes around, a more full-featured podcast was launched called the Saving Country Music Roundup podcast in October of 2023. The idea was to offer some of the articles found on Saving Country Music in audio form, and to delve deeper into certain topics. It would be an alternative for people that don’t have the time to read everything.
On February 29th, Spotify—who had been the original host of the podcast—sent out an email saying that the Saving Country Music Roundup podcast had been removed from all formats due to violating Spotify’s monetization guidelines. This seemed beyond strange since the podcast wasn’t monetized whatsoever. There were no ads, ad reads, sponsors, silent money partners, nothing. A monetization mechanism was hoped to be added down the road, but none existed at the time of the email.
Then, less than a minute before the first email came in, another email came in explaining that the podcast had been fully removed, and the entire account had been deleted for “suspicious payments activity.” Again, there were no suspicious payments, because there weren’t any payments of any kind, and less than a minute was given to address or comply to whatever non-issues that had been automatically flagged by bots before the death penalty on the podcast had been imposed.
A few have reached out since then offering to help to re-populate the podcast using a different host. But why? Podcasting was avoided for a decade due to the lack of being able to use music, and from fear of punitive and aggressive takedowns with no recourse. Now those fears and concerns are only exacerbated, and you still can’t use music.
In truth, the podcast environment is so cluttered and competitive these days, it may not be possible to launch a new podcast. Country History X actually does very well, because it was established before everyone wanted to have a podcast. But even if the ability to use actual music in podcasts is adopted, there may not be any space for these audio-rich podcasts to thrive.
As radio continues to lose market share and podcasts continue to gain it, it is beyond imperative that the music industry address this pressing issue that should have been solved in 2012, let alone 2024. At this point it’s not just about keeping up with emerging formats like TikTok. It’s about deciding if songs and music will be a part of the long form video and audio landscape moving forward, or if it will be virtually locked out because of the music industry is lagging so far behind the changing paradigm.
March 25, 2024 @ 9:07 am
Seems the music industry has tried everything it can to keep propping radio up, like making music licensing so expensive and complicated. I got tired of bitching about country radio, so I started an online radio station. You can use a service like live365, they cover all the music licensing for your channel, but it is kind of pricey per month.
March 25, 2024 @ 3:41 pm
I mean part of the point of licensing is to make sure that artists get paid. Commercial radio stations theoretically make money on advertising and the point of licensing is to make sure that they are passing some of the money along to artists. I believe the musician strikes in the ’40s or ’50s were specifically over this issue, to make sure that musicians weren’t taken advantage of by radio.
I get that there’s more to it than that and I’d love to hear more about how it works on internet radio.
March 25, 2024 @ 5:06 pm
I understand that, and that’s not the problem. The problem I see is that Spotfiy for instance is paying those licenses to the artists when their music is streamed, but not if it’s on a hosted podcast from what I gather from the article. If the podcast is on their platform, I don’t see why it would matter if the music was streamed through a podcast or not
March 25, 2024 @ 10:53 am
WOW. that’s wild. I’ve seen a few artists recently say on social media that they got threats from Spotify that claimed that their songs had been promoted by bot-driven playlists, and there was little recourse to dispute this claim. It’s wild that they went this far in your case.
They seem to be fighting with smaller artists creators in general right now.
March 25, 2024 @ 11:58 am
Not sure there is an industry I can think of that I have less sympathy for than the record business. They consistently screw bands and fans. Always decades behind the times. They would love nothing more than to be back in the days of promo guys with fists full of cash driving around the country with a stack of 45s buying airtime. Been all downhill in their minds since then. Zero vision.
March 25, 2024 @ 1:55 pm
Kinda unrelated to the music licensing aspect of it, but I’d love a podcast where country singers and other creatives in the industry were interviewed about their careers in a deep dive sort of way. Or how about an oral history type thing where different people involved in the recording of a classic song or album discussed the process?
March 25, 2024 @ 3:14 pm
There are some podcasts like that around, but one of the things that discourages this type of programming is the fact that you can’t actual play the song or a fraction of the song in such a podcast as a reference point, even in a way where you could share the revenue with the artist and songwriters.
March 25, 2024 @ 3:20 pm
Trig,
When I was in school I mostly unsuccessfully tried to get to the bottom of music industry accounting in the age of digital, and my only real takeaway was that it’s messy. I wonder if the fact that there’s so much work/man hours involved in determining who is owed what discourages things like this with the podcasts but also just putting up intellectual property for sale on places like iTunes where the expected revenues are not considered worth the cost/effort.
March 26, 2024 @ 10:55 am
Couple of good YouTube channels do this. They don’t only cover country though.
Check out the interviews with Pete Anderson that were done by the Truetone Lounge channel in around 2020. That one is done by another YouTuber who runs a channel called Ask Zac which is primarily a guitar channel. Ask Zac does some pretty amazing deep dives into country guitar players if that’s your thing.
Cody Jung, much younger session guitar player who has played on several independent country projects such as the next to last Waymores album, has a YouTube channel under his own name and he has done similar deep dive interviews. He’s got an interview with Deke Dickerson that’s really interesting, a bunch with the 1990s session guitar players such as Brent Mason I think, and several others.
Otis Gibbs youtube channel is probably the closest to what you’re asking for. His videos are relatively short and he interviews people like Kenny Vaughn and a lot of very random country musicians, many of whom were session players. And he really hits that interesting intersection between alt-country, rock, etc
March 26, 2024 @ 4:03 pm
Cool, thanks!
March 27, 2024 @ 2:07 pm
Song Exploder is a great show for this. The host brings on an artist to talk about the making of one of their songs, from the writing process, to recording, to working with a producer. They often play snippets of early demos and will deconstruct the song to its individual instrumental components, so you can hear all the minutiae.
March 25, 2024 @ 2:08 pm
Don’t know if this is related but Risky Whiff was running a podcast on Spotify pretty much every month for several years up until September of 2023. Then it just stopped. Mostly two knuckleheads fan-boying artists they interviewed, but it was harmless enough and entertaining to hear Koe talk about getting blackout drunk every other day. I wonder if they too got a cease and desist nastygram?
And no mean tweets about me listening to them please. If SCM is daily newspaper, sometimes it’s fun to read the comic section…..
March 25, 2024 @ 3:24 pm
It’s just becoming prohibitive to impossible to podcast these days and I think that’s why were seeing so many folks moving on from it in the music space. It affords a huge opportunity. But without music and with the constant threats of takedowns, why mess with it.
As I always say, Whiskey Riff has been an important player in pushing some worthy artists forward. I don’t begrudge those dudes their success. But yes, you have to wade through a lot of other stuff to find it.
March 25, 2024 @ 4:47 pm
Curious as I’m not social media savvy but is YouTube basically the Wild Wild West? Seems like anything goes on there – people playing songs and reviewing them, playing music vids and reviewing them, destroying perfectly good songs with horrible off-key covers, etc…. I’ve heard facebook has bots listening for copyrighted songs in content and they shut it down fast. How does virtually anything go on YouTube though? Is that a viable option for you Trig and others on here that have been screwed by Spotify?
March 25, 2024 @ 5:11 pm
My understanding is that YouTube will let you use copyrighted music in certain situations, but the money from any ads shown in the video gets distributed to the artists and not to the creator of the video.
It’s a lot more complicated than that but that’s one of the ways some of those videos operate.
Lots of users get copyright claims and takedown strikes and sometimes it’s not even done by the actual rights holders. There are some real horror stories out there about this stuff.
March 26, 2024 @ 1:17 pm
I’m a fan of Rick Beato’s Everything Music channel and I’ve noticed it depends greatly on the artist/company. For some songs he can not only play them but break them down and do deep dives on how they’re done (his “What Makes This Song Great” series). But other artists will jump him if he plays even a few seconds of their music.
March 25, 2024 @ 2:24 pm
My Spotify ‘BayCity Country’ Music + Talk podcast will cease on June 1st 2924 when Spotify close that facility. Even though I have a 4.5 rating with a fair audience makes no difference. The system worked OK, not perfect but it was fun making the 1 hour+ episode each month but Spotify in their wisdom have pulled the plug and looks as if what I was doing has been replaced with a stupid AI DJ. Its bloody horrible. Keep punching Trigger, one day someone may come to their senses. Pete.
March 25, 2024 @ 3:15 pm
Sorry to hear that Peter.
March 25, 2024 @ 5:54 pm
“Spotify now allows podcasters who use their format to place songs into podcasts. But this is only available on Spotify itself—meaning people who listen to podcasts on YouTube, Apple, Amazon, or anywhere else cannot hear or see these podcasts. You also have to play the entire song in a slot you designate Spotify to place the song in. This makes it entirely useless for a podcast that might want to only use a sample of a song, or talk over the intro or outtro of a song.”
– Starting in June, Spotify for Podcasters will also be discontinuing its web and mobile native creation tools including recording and editing as well as its ‘Music + Talk’ format, which was an experimental feature that the platform launched to include full licensed music tracks in podcast episodes.Feb 9, 2024
March 25, 2024 @ 8:49 pm
Ha! So it goes from bad to worse. Figures.
I’ve added an update to the story.
March 26, 2024 @ 6:04 am
They cut that. They’re promoting AI playlists. If artists don’t record in hi-res lossless, the algorithm doesn’t push the artist’s music on Apple Music. I’m sure there’s more nefarious stuff going on.
I do not like these trends here lately.
March 26, 2024 @ 9:05 am
We ran a long thread about this on the countrymusic subreddit, and tried to figure out what the cost of the alternatives is.
Spotify Ends Music + Talk Podcasts and other podcasting features:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CountryMusic/s/zro6DtjU6d
If any of you guys are doing internet radio somewhere else, could you pop into that thread and tell us what is involved on live365 or mixcloud, or what it costd for you to selfhost?
March 25, 2024 @ 7:56 pm
Hello Jerry. Spotify have notified me that my Music + Talk podcast will cease worldwide June 1st 2024. The facility started in AU around mid 2022. It was an OK setup apart from a 3 to near 8 second dead spot when the music finished till any talk could start. This silent time could not be edited out. I liked the thing that you could not talk over the start or prior to the finish of a song, That in my eyes is best left to basically the non listened to radio DJ’s.
March 26, 2024 @ 5:17 am
Recently a local sports radio show that broadcasts in the morning and puts up the show as a podcast had to stop including music on the podcast versions. They typically play songs pertaining to the topic as they come back from break or will listen and kind of talk over it. It’s annoying as it was funny to see what song they would play based on the topic. Had to quit because of this licensing issue. Hadn’t had a problem the previous 10 years. It was a good way to learn songs that I wasn’t familiar with but not it’s gone and doesn’t seem likely to be settled anytime soon. Sucks.
March 26, 2024 @ 6:39 am
The current sledgehammer approach by the music industry and YouTube is ridiculous. I like to watch car related videos on YouTube, and several of the producers of the shows have complained about videos being taken down, and threats to remove their show, simply from recording a show in a public area where music is being played somewhere in the background. I watched one show where they kept having to mute the sound because cars were driving by playing music and they didn’t want their video to be flagged.
I can understand why artists and the music industry are trying to reel in profit in this new world of streaming. Yet there should be some way for podcasts/videocasts to be able to produce a show containing music, especially a podcast promoting the music. Perhaps only allowing a certain time length of a song, say 20-30 seconds, along with the requirement of giving the artist credit in the broadcast and in the links. It would essentially be free advertising for the music used, and be beneficial to both the music industry and the podcaster.
Doubt it will happen anytime soon though. The industry and especially YouTube seem to prefer the sledgehammer approach over reasonable accommodation.
March 26, 2024 @ 11:34 am
“Country History X actually does very well, because it was established before everyone wanted to have a podcast.”
This desire well predates 2021 or whenever your pod started imo. Podcasts have been popular for many, many years and the barrier for entry has been super low for nearly as long. Podcasts didn’t suddenly grow in popular 2 or 3 years ago.
March 26, 2024 @ 12:19 pm
You might be right. I guess I could have worded that differently. Because Country History X was started three years ago, it’s fairing much better than a podcast started today would. It was definitely doing better than the Caving Country Music Roundup podcast was doing before Spotify gave it the death penalty.
March 26, 2024 @ 12:48 pm
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I understand the music industry is in business to make money, I really do. And I don’t begrudge them that. But the way they go about it frequently baffles me.
I listened to WB Walker’s podcast. I heard songs I liked. I bought the records. For artists I really liked I looked for earlier records and bought those too. And when the artists subsequently released new records I bought those too.
You industry guys hear that? I. BOUGHT. RECORDS. YOU. MADE. MONEY. Just because they weren’t Beyonce or Taylor Swift records it was spendable money all the same.