Music and Podcast Licensing: Which Rights You Actually Need

Use thirty seconds of a song in a video and you are using two copyrighted works at once: the musical composition — the notes and lyrics — and the particular sound recording that captured a performance of it. They are separately owned, separately licensed, and separately priced. A clearance that covers one and not the other is not a partial clearance. It is an infringement of the right that was missed.

Everything else in music licensing follows from that split, plus one more question: is the finished product audiovisual, or audio-only? Those two facts determine which licences you need, who grants them, and whether a compulsory route exists at all.

Two copyrights, two owners, two conversations

The composition is typically controlled by a music publisher, often shared across several publishers because most commercial songs have multiple writers with different deals. The sound recording — the master — is typically controlled by a record label, or by the artist where the recording was independently financed.

The practical consequence is that clearing a well-known song usually means contacting several publishers plus one label, and that any single one of them can refuse. There is no arbitrator and no rate card for most of these uses. A publisher holding a 25 percent share of a composition can block the whole project, which is why clearance work starts with identifying every share and not with negotiating price.

The split also explains two common misconceptions. Re-recording a song with session musicians avoids the master, not the composition; you still need composition rights. Conversely, buying a track on a streaming service or a download store licenses personal listening, not any form of reproduction, distribution, public performance, or synchronisation in your own content.

Audiovisual work: sync plus master

Synchronisation is the right to time a composition with visual images. Master use is the parallel right to use the specific recording in that timed relationship. Neither is compulsory. Both are negotiated, and their terms are usually mirrored — a common practice known as most-favoured-nations treatment, where each side agrees to accept the same fee and terms as the other so neither can be outbid.

The deal points that matter are the same four levers that govern any licence: term, territory, media, and exclusivity, plus the specific option structure for expansion. A licence for "festival and film markets, two years, worldwide" is not a licence for streaming distribution afterwards, and buying that expansion later — once the film is finished and the music is embedded — is where budgets break. Options for wider media should be priced at the start, when the licensor still has an incentive to be reasonable. The general architecture is covered in scope, exclusivity, royalties, and termination.

Two additional rights are easy to forget. A recognisable performer's identity in the recording can raise separate state-law claims, particularly for advertising uses and for sound-alike recordings that imitate a distinctive voice; that exposure is covered in commercial use of name, image, voice, and likeness. And where a licensed composition is subject to a notice of termination, the identity of the person who can grant new synchronisation rights may change — see recapturing transferred rights.

Why podcasts are the hard case

Podcasting sits in a gap. The statutory mechanical licence lets anyone make and distribute recordings of a musical work that has already been distributed to the public, and the blanket licence administered for digital music providers covers downloads and interactive streams of music services. Neither covers dropping a commercial track into a talk programme. A podcast episode is not a phonorecord of the musical work in the sense the compulsory licence contemplates, and the blanket digital licence is written for music services, not for spoken-word publishers.

There is also no performing-rights blanket that solves it. Performance licences held by venues, broadcasters and streaming services do not travel to a downloadable episode file distributed by a third party, and a podcast's episodes are reproduced and distributed as well as transmitted.

That leaves four workable routes, in descending order of cost and ascending order of certainty.

1. Direct licences

   Negotiate with each publisher and the label for the specific episode. Viable for a single flagship use; unmanageable as a weekly practice, and rights holders often decline outright for podcasts.

2. Production library music

   One licence from a library covers both copyrights because the library controls both. Read the term, territory, and whether the licence covers advertising-supported distribution and derivative cut-downs.

3. Commissioned original music

   A composer agreement with a clear assignment or work-for-hire clause and a written grant of all needed rights. Highest control, and the only route that makes theme music genuinely yours.

4. Talk about music instead of playing it

   Short quotation for genuine criticism or commentary may be defensible, but background use, montage, and "just the chorus" are not. The analysis is in applying the four fair use factors.

Verify before relying: "royalty-free" describes a pricing model, not a grant of rights. Read the actual licence for media, term, territory, whether monetised distribution is included, and whether the platform's own content-matching system will still flag the track.

Public domain runs on two clocks

Because the composition and the recording are separate works, they fall into the public domain at different times, and a modern recording of an old song is fully protected even though the song is free.

As of 2026, published United States musical compositions from 1930 and earlier are in the public domain, with a new year entering each January. Sound recordings follow their own federal schedule created by legislation in 2018 that brought pre-1972 recordings under federal law: recordings first published before 1923 lost protection at the end of 2021, and recordings from 1923 onward entered the public domain on a rolling basis, so as of 2026 the boundary sits at recordings first published in 1925 and earlier. Verify any specific title against Copyright Office records rather than a chart, since publication dates, renewals, and foreign restoration all create exceptions.

Two traps recur. A public domain melody can carry a protected modern arrangement, and the arrangement is a separate copyrightable work. And a public domain recording distributed by a platform may still trigger an automated match against a later remaster, producing a takedown that has to be answered through the platform's process — see takedown and counter-notice procedures and the statutory counter-notice route.

Deal points worth arguing about

• Term. Content stays online indefinitely. A licence in perpetuity, or at minimum for the life of the production, avoids a take-down obligation years later.
• Territory. Worldwide, since distribution platforms are not geographically bounded and geo-fencing an episode is not realistic.
• Media. List the channels explicitly: streaming, download, social clips, paid advertising cut-downs, trailers, and in-context excerpts used to promote the work.
• Alterations. The right to edit, loop, shorten, and fade. Moral-rights and alteration clauses can bar exactly the edit an episode needs.
• Warranty and indemnity. The licensor should warrant that it controls the share it is granting and identify any other required consents; treat a licence without an ownership warranty as unfinished.
• Share confirmation. For compositions, obtain the ownership split in writing. A licensor granting "its share" is not granting the whole composition.
• Credits. Required credit language, where it appears, and whether omission is a breach or a curable oversight.

For original music, the paperwork does the same job in reverse. Split sheets signed in the session, written agreements with performers and producers, and a clear assignment for anyone paid to contribute prevent the most common ownership dispute in independent production: an uncredited contributor who claims joint authorship years later, when the work finally earns money. An exclusive license from each contributor is second best; assignment is cleaner.

Questions the desk gets

Is there a length of music I can use without a licence?

No. The often-repeated seven-second, ten-second, or thirty-second rules do not exist in the Copyright Act or in any case. Amount used is one consideration inside the fair use analysis under 17 U.S.C. § 107, and a short excerpt of a song's hook can be more damaging than a longer excerpt of a verse. Treat any recognisable use as requiring clearance.

We bought a licence from a stock site. Are we covered on both copyrights?

Usually yes for library music, because the library controls both the composition and the recording, and that is the whole value of the model. Confirm it in the licence text rather than assuming. Then check the scope limits that libraries do impose: number of productions, whether paid advertising is included, whether the licence covers a client's use if you are an agency, and whether it survives if you cancel the subscription.

Does crediting the artist help?

Not legally. Attribution is good practice and can matter to a licensor's goodwill, but it is not a defence to infringement and it does not convert an unlicensed use into a licensed one. It also does not affect the fair use analysis in any meaningful way. Credit where required by a licence; never rely on credit in place of one.

A guest sang part of a song on our show. Is that different?

It is still a use of the composition, and now you have created a new recording of it. Distributing the episode reproduces and distributes that performance, which requires composition rights even though no master licence is needed. Live performance in a licensed venue does not carry over to the recorded distribution. In practice, either clear it or cut it.

How to use this brief

Start every clearance with two columns: composition and recording. Write down who controls each, in what shares, and whether both have said yes in writing. If either column is blank, the project is not cleared, whatever anyone has been told verbally.

Then match the use to the licence family. Audiovisual means sync plus master. Audio-only means direct deals or library music, because no compulsory route reaches it. Original commissioned music means contracts with everyone who touched the session. Set term, territory, and media wide at the outset, because retro-fitting a licence to content already published is the most expensive way to buy music rights. Related licensing and platform-procedure work sits on the Intellectual Property & Media desk. This brief is general information about United States copyright practice, not legal advice about a particular clearance.