As I've written over the past couple of days, I'm licensed up and ready to roll with my Internet Radio podcasting station. I've filed all the paperwork and paid filing and initial royalty payments with the Library of Congress, Soundexchange (the RIAA collection agency), ASCAP and BMI. I promised to talk about the details of that process with Ross over a Skype interview, so I'll save that for a few days. 

The next step is set up a reporting system so I can accurately report how much I owe to the various rights organizations. I think a few Excel files in which I chronicle the list of songs I play and the dates and number of downloads will be sufficient. Adam says we don't have any tools yet for podcasting; he's right, and we certainly don't have any tools for automating licensing reporting and royalty payments.

All this preparation though has made me realize how expensive RSS might be as a delivery device for licensed content. For example, under the webcasting statutory license, I'll pay a royalty fee on every download, whether the person on the other end of the subscription feed listens to it or not. If other RSS readers and podcast subscribers are like me, they subscribe to waaaay more stuff than they can actually consume. I've also noticed that iPodder occasionally downloads enclosures that I already have, but under the statutory royalty scheme, I pay royalties on redundant downloads. I'm still convinced that RSS is the best way to deliver webcasts/podcasts. It just means that a revenue model has to support the "waste" (poor word choice, but reasonably accurate) inherent in the way RSS data is consumed.

In order to avoid finding myself with a RIAA bill that requires me to take out a second mortgage on my house, I'm going to start slowly and just to see how it goes. The first thing I'm doing is putting my RSS feed of RIAA-licensed music behind a blogware restricted category. Any subscriber to my weblog (see the subscribe button in the top margin) will have rights to read the category and download the shows. Anyone else with a blogware reader account, just post an "Add me" comment in the space below or send me an e-mail with your blogware account name, and I'll add you too. (You don't need to provide your real name when creating an account, so you can be anonymous if you choose.) 

After I've played with the medium a little bit and gauged whether revenue from GoogleAds and my Amazon Associate account is sufficient to pay for the likely royalties, I'll open it up to everyone else.

I expect to post the first podcast into the "Internet Pro Radio" category (see right margin) later tonight.