Month: October 2022
Podcasting is the new thing in broadcasting nowadays. Practically anyone can create his own podcast and make himself known to the world. Perhaps the best thing about podcasting is that it is meant to be free. In addition to that, podcasts transcend the boundaries of traditional broadcasting. You may be from the US but anyone with access to the internet can listen to your podcast. A person may be in Timbuktu and yet have access to your podcast.
Music is inherent to the success of any podcast. It adds spice and flavor to an otherwise bland broadcast. That is why a large pool of resources has been developed by people in the podcasting community. Beginners and veterans a like search for the perfect background music or filler sounds for every podcast they make. So how do you go about looking for that spice?
Despite the freedom provided by podcasting, there are some issues you must address before jumping into the bandwagon and creating your own podcast. Copyright and intellectual property rights have been a main concern in all aspects of broadcasting for some time now and podcasting is not exempt from that. As a result, the term podsafe has come into existence. What exactly is podsafe? This term encompasses any material that may be used for podcasts without violating any copyright or license. A special thing about podsafe material is that the very same material might require some sort of license in other media but totally safe for podcasting. Due to the open community nature of podcasting, many songs, music, and other type of materials are allowed to be used for free exclusively for podcasts. While you might have to acquire the permission of the copyright holder for other broadcasting media, with podsafe material, you can use it freely in podcasts.
Some specific kinds of work are inherently podsafe. Works that fall under the public domain or some works with Creative Commons licenses can be used in podcasts without any issues. They are meant to be used, and used freely.
There are some entities on the web that license music especially for podcasts. Their podcast safe music is generally available to anyone for downloading and for use in free broadcasts over the internet. The only restriction they have is for the user to duly acknowledge the source. Anyone may also post music on their sites as long as the piece of work is totally original.
Some sites make their music available for no fee at all. On the other hand there are sites which promote artists particularly independent ones and charge a small fee for downloading their songs. Notably, these sites also offer labeled artists and are supposed to split the downloading fees with them.
The important thing to bear in mind when looking for podcast safe music is that most of the groups offering materials make them available to the general public for free. The caveat is that your podcast must not be used for commercial purposes. If that is the case, then you will have no problems finding the right track for your podcast.
When I first started making music back in the 1980’s, I didn’t think I ever could get my music out to a large audience – and getting payed for it never ever crossed my mind.
During the years I created thousands of tunes. Many compositions were created together with friends, and later I started to make demos that we sent out to record labels. Together with a friend, we got signed on a small Swedish label that wanted to release one of our techno/trance tracks. We were of course very happy for this, and had big plans for the future. This is the first time I came across talks about earning money in context of our music.
However, that record label got into economic problems and we never saw our tune get released. Sadly so, because we both thought it was a very good song and we had a strong concept. The band name we choose was Cube, and we created some sort of mix between techno, trance and euro-disco.
The whole disco scene has always interested me, and I started up a large streaming radio channel via an online service back in the late 1990’s. This proved to be successful, especially since I played only Italo Disco and had many very obscure and different songs in the playlist. At one time, the radio station – then called SouthPole Radio – was the largest Italo Disco radio station on the internet.
But it is costly to run a radio station. Not only hosting and bandwidth – it also costs money to make it legal. All this was done by the online service, but I never got anything back. My radio station was free for all to listen to, and even though I recieved many happy emails about how good the station was, I spent more and more money on the music.
The station did inspire me to keep writing my own music, and I started yet again to create own tunes. This lead to buying equipment, and somewhere during 2000-2001, I created songs with an Amiga 1200 as sequencer (and sampler) hooked up to a Novation BassStation keyboard, a Roland TR-505 (a not so good drum machine) and a Roland SC-88 MkII – a very nice synth module with lots of good sounds.
But over the years, different software sollutions proved to be an improvement to the hardware. The equipment was sold and production started with only different sort of software programs, using everything from PC, Mac and even Atari computers.
When I first laid hands on Spotify I was amazed. Spotify is a very good music streaming service that is free in many parts of the world. But even the paid accounts are worth the money. Spotify tries to distribute all music ever published, which I believe is a hard and tough, but very good, goal.
Since Spotify is available all over the world today, and the fact that they have so much different music, there were no more use for an Italo Disco exclusive radio station anymore. SouthPole Radio was therefore turned into a record label, and in November 2009 SouthPole Radio released its first album: Antarctica, by Pingo (spotify:album:7zUqiTY4BmwXXUWhP1kyti).
Before we released any album at all, we made a lot of research on how to actually release music on Spotify. First, we wanted to release for UK and USA charts too, and other media centers as Apple’s AppStore, Amazon and such. However, this proved to be fairly expensive, and without our label and artist name well known, we didn’t want to take that chance.
However, several different online systems (Ditto Music was the one we finally signed with) had very cheap methods for distributing to Spotify. SouthPole Radio therefore decided to exclusivly launch the first album on Spotify via this online system. It was very easy too!
Here is how we did it:
First we saved all the tunes in mp3-format in 320Kbps or higher resolution. After that, we created an account with Ditto Music and payed the 2 up front fee. This is a monthly fee that has to be payed for hosting, accounting and such. It is very cheap, and if you get 100 streams per month, you will break even.
You then upload the tunes together with a 800×800 pixel JPG-picture that is your cover art.
That’s it! After that, it takes about 4-5 weeks, and then your music is live for as long as you pay the 2 monthly fee.
For each stream that people listen to in Spotify you will get 0.02. This is also payed out to you monthly.
This is probably the most easy way – and maybe even the cheapest – to get your music on Spotify – and get payed for it! With a bit of marketing, you will get a lot of listeners, and the more listeners, the more you get payed.
If you then update your account on Ditto Music with downloads and other sales, you can keep selling your music for a profit.
If you want to know more, check out SouthPole Radio’s Official Website (http://www.SouthPoleRadio.com) and read our constantly updated news where we write about our newest releases, how to create your own album, how to get more listeners on Spotify and other interesting and important information that will help your own music career.