The I’s Cube track is incredible, and I totally understand wanting to share it with others. However, the only permission they’ve granted so far is for me to play it, not anyone else. Record labels are scared of losing control of their property, and I don’t want to give them any reason to believe that podcasters and podcast listeners are out to steal their music.
Please, please, please don’t extract the song from the podcast and redistribute it. Feel free to hotlink to it and tell people to start listening at the 6:23 mark. I can afford the bandwidth. Also, I want keep an accurate count of how many people have listened to it.
I’m hoping I’ll soon get the opportunity try to convince them to make the track podsafe and use CD Baby for online and offline sales. Yamaha already has a site for downloading songs, but the DRM they’re using is absolutely draconian and not compatible with iPods or Macs. What that says to me is their top executives probably think that when it comes to online distribution that’s the only way to go, and if you want to listen to their music you have to play by their rules, end of discussion. I’m going to try to show them the benefits of podcasting, but I imagine that using “mp3,” “music” and “download” all in the same sentence will make them immediately stop listening to anything else I have to say.
I need to get them to think like drug pushers–the most effective way to hook people is to make the first hit free.
