Shazam to the rescue…
I love the This American Life podcast. So much so, in fact, that I look forward to my Monday morning walk to work because that’s when I first listen to it. However, as a music buff as well, their policy of not identifying the music in their podcasts makes me crazy. From the TAL FAQ:
What’s that great music you’re playing under the stories?
We list the songs between stories on the individual episode pages in the radio archive. Over the years, we’ve used hundreds of songs under our stories—and in some stories, we use a number of different songs in different sections. We tried to answer these emails for awhile, but often it was impossible sometimes to pinpoint which song people were asking about—and the reality of digging up the answer completely overwhelmed us. We do keep track, but the files are kept in one place, and our web manager is in another. For this reason, it’s unfortunately not possible for us to answer emails asking what music was playing under a particular story. That said, if you’re just browsing for ideas generally, some of the music on the show comes from movie soundtracks: Donnie Darko, Amelie, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Virgin Suicides, I Heart Huckabees, and others. We also use a lot of Calexico and Bexar Bexar.
So three weeks ago they aired the “Prom” episode #186 and between minutes 16:05-17:30 there was music that was absolutely familiar to me but I couldn’t identify it. It’s been driving me nuts for weeks. At one point I even tried to listen to everything in my 9000 item iTunes library that I thought could conceivably match. Today it occurred to me to use Shazam and despite the broadcast on top of the music, Shazam identified it as… “Ending (Ascent)” by Brian Eno. Duh… I knew that.
Can someone please explain to me why This American Life can get away without crediting the music in any way, shape or form? Don’t they have to pay royalties on it? And since they admit they are keeping track of the music used, how hard is it to include the list, even if they don’t list the exact times?
