I was in a meeting with one of my clients the other day. Well, I say ‘meeting’ – we were in a coffee shop laughing at the fact that our grandparents would have been disgusted by anything that contained soya milk, and that a latte would have been dismissed as ‘foreign muck’.
In the midst of this meeting, though, my client turned to me and she said ‘Pete, who owns my podcast?’.
Now, I have no problem confessing when I don’t know something. We’ve all seen those people who try and bluff and bluster their way out of the situation – but there was no way I could do that with this; I honestly didn’t know. I had a fair idea, but I don’t think that that is enough to confidently answer a client’s query.
So – I started doing some research. I’ll be honest, the final answer was a bit of a surprise…
The surprise came from the fact that there isn’t one single answer. There’s a couple of little avenues that we’ll have to go down to full explain the ownership of your podcast.
Let’s start with Apple Podcasts. They are pretty explicit with it, saying that they retain no ownership of your podcast. To be honest, though, I never thought it would be anything else with Apple – they don’t have anything to do with the audio itself, they just link to your RSS Feed.
Soundcloud, Spotify, Google and audioboom are also very clear, describing it in the Terms & Conditions as ‘YOUR audio’ or ‘YOUR podcast’. Essentially, and crucially, they have no right to use your audio how they see fit. It’s yours.
Now, it’s worth pointing out that whilst none of these hosting sites and directories actually own your audio – that doesn’t mean that they can’t insert ads into your podcast. Dynamic Ad Insertion is becoming a much more common practise; whereby the podcast directories place ads in the middle of your podcast – and you have no say over which clients have their adverts in your episodes.
So far, so good – but what about some of the other hosting sites? Libsyn, one of the world’s leading podcast hosting sites are also in the clear. Again, they describe it as ‘YOUR audio’ etc.
The issue comes about, though, when you use a production company to edit, produce or digitally host your podcast. That’s where the small print can really cause problems…
You see, if you use a production company, some of them will have a clause in their contracts that stipulates that the ‘project’ that is your podcast, belongs to them. This is to prevent clients from taking all of their audio back, and passing it onto other (cheaper) production companies. You still own the raw audio, but anything that a production company works on – that could belong to them.
Now, genuinely, this article wasn’t crafted as some kind of sales pitch…. However, I can tell you that MonkeyPants Productions doesn’t do this – your podcast is YOURS from beginning to end.
So – the point of this article is to serve as a warning, I guess. If you’re using a third party to edit and produce your business podcast – make sure that the small print stipulates who owns the podcast. If it doesn’t cover you – might me worth meeting up for a cup of ‘foreign muck’ and sorting it out.