zUMG! Far from Universal

A commenter on the Facebook page asked why the latest podcast wasn’t showing up on iTunes.

A reminder – Radio Clash is no longer on iTunes store/Apple Podcasts or Spotify due to Universal UMG being nasty evil dicks. That’s why I don’t play UMG artists on the podcast unless they are mashed up (hard to police every sample source for the mashup shows – and mashups can’t be licensed anyway).

I asked Spotify and Apple to explain nearly a year ago why they pulled Radio Clash and they just ignored me.

There is NO blanket music license for podcasts. You heard me correctly, nearly 2 decades later and no way of legally clearing music without individually clearing each track, like a film and equally expensive and a logistical nightmare. That’s if you can clear it at all – rights orgs and labels hate downloadable podcasts (that’s why Mixcloud is OK, streaming and all those restrictions about replays and number of tracks from a single act or album).. It’s ridiculous.

So if you want to hear Radio Clash – check out the Subscribe page / for other options/apps that don’t just cave into a nasty corporate, or add the RSS subscribe link manually to iTunes or your podcast app of choice. I think all of them allow you to manually add a URL, or should.

And again, I urge listeners to boycott UMG, and artists please don’t sign with them. They obviously hate all the decades of free promo – which I never made a cent from, actually lost money doing this – of their acts, so they don’t deserve your money or time either. They are literally why we can’t have nice things.

Sign with independents, release your music on Bandcamp, I hope the lockdown proved how little major corporations do to actually help artists to survive. DIY is the way to go. I certainly prioritise independently released music now, as well as my longstanding support of queer/LGBTQ & black/POC artists. I want to reveal under-represented and copyleft/’illegal’ music to you all. I just really liked that George Michael b-side cover…wasn’t even one of his own tracks actually. I suspect he’d be appalled at such business shenanigans if he was alive, after what happened to him with Sony.

(Cover graphic adapted from this logo parody – obviously all views above are my own and not theirs. Their logo was a Three Stooges homage in Blender, not I think intended as a crictisicm of UMG.)