I’m confused… Zoe’s music was used –cut and spliced– into the MIDDLE of the piece on the two girls who fell asleep on the train tracks. Does that qualify as interlude, interstitial, or bumper music?

She’s in Australia right now in the middle of some pretty intensive gigs, which is probably why you haven’t heard from her… I’ll pass a message onto her for you and Bob.

Thanks for doing what you do, and for addressing this!

My name is Andy Carvin, and I work at NPR at our social media desk in the news division. I heard about this via Wil Wheaton’s blog over the weekend, and as I posted over there on Saturday, I’ve been looking into it. (I’m also gonna post an update on his blog as well.)

I just talked with Bob Boilen, former director of All Things Considered and host of All Songs Considered. When he was director of ATC, he was in charge of selecting music, so he knows a lot about how this works.

Essentially, there are two issues here: permissions and crediting. Permissions is fairly straightforward. NPR pays fees to major music licensing orgs like ASCAP, of which many musicians are members. That allows us to use snippets of music on air without having to negotiate permission on a case-by-case basis. Meanwhile, many artists also submit their music to NPR in the hopes of having it played on air. But since Zoe’s music is ASCAP registered, permissions would have been covered under that relationship, since we pay ASCAP fees as well. So if the system works properly, Zoe gets paid by ASCAP when we air her work and log it properly.

The other issue, though, is NPR giving Zoe credit. Zoe notes correctly that entities using ASCAP are supposed to log their music plays. NPR has an in-house system for doing this, so we can track all of the music we use, report on that use, and give credit to the artist publicly. If you look at the rundown the day the story in question aired, the song that follows the story is by the band Tuatara. The rundown page credits that band, and when you listen to the audio for the story, that’s the music you hear. So at least on our website, which captures the stories and music interludes we broadcast, there’s no sign of Zoe’s music that I can find so far.

I thought this was strange, so Bob and I searched our internal database for Zoe’s music, since that would tell us if she’d ever been considered or actually used by one of our shows. Two shows listed her music – Morning Edition and Day to Day. I can’t tell if this means they actually used her music at one point, or if they merely flagged it as of potential interest. Either way, nothing turned up for All Things Considered.

I asked Bob why this might be the case, and he came up with two theories. One is that NPR itself didn’t use her music in the broadcast, but a local station used a piece of hers as interstitial music – and that’s what Zoe ended up hearing. Stations often will layer their own local content, including music interludes, over our national programming, so it’s possible that Zoe happened to hear a local station do this. Bob’s other theory was that it was possible that one of the hourly feeds of All Things Considered switched the music around for some reason, and it didn’t get logged properly. ATC is re-aired each hour so stations around the country can choose when they want to begin airing it, and sometimes edits are made to subsequent feeds. In theory, though, this should at least be flagged when we do a search for Zoe’s music in our database, but it’s possible that something fell through the cracks.

So at this point, I’m close to reaching a dead end, but not entirely. I plan to ask the director of the show that day to see if he knows Zoe’s music. If he says yes, it probably means something went wrong with the logging of a feed. If he says no, it probably means it was a local station using her music and not NPR itself.

It would also help if Zoe could reconfirm that this was indeed the story she heard, and if she could say what time of day she heard the story, and at what point in the story she heard her music. Either way, I’m gonna keep poking around.

Lastly, a message for Zoe – please get in touch with me or Bob Boilen. Bob really likes your music and wants to talk to you about it. :-)

thanks,
Andy Carvin
@acarvin on Twitter

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-licensing3.htm

I don’t like to hear the “you should be flattered” argument. Artists hear it all the time. I don’t like the way it presupposes that producers of original content should be grateful to give their work away, whereas the gatekeepers have the right to choose what to present and how and what it’s worth. Content producers-creatives, photographers, musicians, etc.-also have the right to decide what their work is worth to them and how and where to give it away.