Some friends and I are all very passionate about music, not playing it but enjoying it. Between all of us, we buy several CDs a week. We’ve been thinking about starting a project, a review site. Like Rolling Stone or Pitchfork…where we listen to new releases and review them.
However, being college students, we don’t always have the time to write up reviews when we have several textbooks to read, essays to write, and calculus problems to work out.
Recently we’ve thought about starting a podcast where we review the albums, but obviously, through audio, talking about them instead of writing reviews out.
I’ve been a DJ at my college radio station, while there I was allowed to play really anything I wanted on the radio, both on the FM station, and the school’s online station. After every show I had to update a log of what songs were played, and I assume the station used that conjunction with however they pay royalties (or whatever, I’m not really sure).
I’ve listened to several podcasts where as people review albums, they play segments or a song or two. That’s what we’d like to do, but we don’t know whether there’s a limit to how much you can play, what you can play, if you need licensing of some sort, or any of that. I’m completely clueless.
I was wondering if anyone could answer my question, which basically is: “Is it okay if, as we review albums on this podcast, we play short segments of a couple songs? Probably between 10-30 seconds, and never more than about 3 songs per album, if that.”
Thanks in advance.