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The *royalty* payments are only for RIAA/BMI/ASCAP/Harry Fox related artists and labels. All the labels in the indie scene and the labels are actually labels that are much bigger than you might think (though this excludes the fake indies or 'boutique labels') will give you - if you ask nicely - a blanket license not only to stream their music but to podcast it as well. Podcasting has serious licensing issues well beyond streaming internet radio but all of this is obviated if you are allowed to negotiate with the label or the copyright owner directly. Remember the RIAA/BMI/Harry Fox are acting on behalf of *their* labels, not music in general. They can not dictate what a label or an artist themselves say if the artist and the labels are not part of that agency.

To be clear, my show gets about 1500 listeners a week and industrial / new wave electro and here is a list of labels that have given permission:

http://www.bloosqr.com/the%20essence/the%20labels. html

*the irony* of these laws it is giving these labels much more exposure because by definition the indie/hipster/creative kids making their shows are now even more likely to only play music from the indie labels and more over anyone looking for internet music is more than likely to be exposed to music from these labels which given the distate for the "big 4" could easily turn some of these artists/labels into the next big thing

Everyone has different limits for what is tolerable but i think most people can tell the difference betweeen 128k aac and 192k aac. The problem with paying "more" for lossless is then it becomes obvious you are paying more than the CD, rather than just paying for something that is the same as a cd (psychologically) just in a downloadable format.

The irony of 128k aac, is there are now podcast shows (such as mine) that remix songs that are of higher quality than itunes actually sells. I picked 192k aac as that was the limit of me being able to tell (and bandwidth is dirt cheap, lets face it). For storage, i rip at 320k mp3 (non vbr), i think we are almost at the point where just saving to FLAC is feasible since drive space is practically free.

I run a synth podcast show and because of legal reasons have had many contacts w/ labels (me contacting them for permission, not them busting me) and I can not emphasize how cool the nettwerk label is :

Check out their about page :

Nettwerk Music Group is Canada's leading privately owned record label and artist management company. Nettwerk is responsible for managing some of Canada's biggest artists like Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies and many others. Nettwerk has several offices located around the world including offices in New York, Los Angeles and London; with our main office right next to Granville Island in Vancouver, B.C.


Litigation is destructive, it must stop .... as per Nettwerk copyrights, we have never sued anybody and all our music is open source to encourage fans to share it with others and help us promote our Artists. As per those Artists we manage on other labels (Majors), we take issue with those labels claiming that litigating our fans is in our interest, as it clearly is not.

Even the smaller indie labels have not taken a stand as strong as Nettwerk has. Nettwerk is indie, but they carry Sarah Maclachlan, Delerium, Avril Lavigne and bands of that size, so they aren't exactly small.

I have recently started running a podcast myself

The focus of this podcast is reasonably specific : electro,new wave, goth, industrial, ebm, synth, electroclash, new wave :

http://www.bloosqr.com/

When I first started advertising I have posted to all the 'aggregators" and I can tell you from looking
at my logs, no one comes from those things. The Itunes searching thing works reasonably well. What does work is looking at myspace/livejournal groups that have similar interests at least for electro/synth..
So I would say it really depends on what you like, if you listen to emo, find the emo groups, if you listen to goth, the goth groups, college indie, the college indie groups. Online magazines will have a links/radio section (for us its industrial nation and sideline as the big two).

If your genre/music interests isn't really specialized to have magazines the two aggregators that seem to actually be useful are

    Try the apple itunes directories via searching and

podcast directory

  http://www.podcastdirectory.com/

the best

-bloosqr

m4a aka aac are much better. The quality is much smoother and it is very easy to setup hyperlinking and skipping, image based chapters (for each song). These things work both on the downloaded .m4a file w/in itunes as well as the web based quicktime plugin. As itunes is so ubiquitous/free and quicktime also free I dont think there
is much of a downside of going this route.

To see an example of this, that I recently created check out :

http://www.bloosqr.com/the%20essence/the%20Podcast /the%20Podcast.html

-best
-bloosqr