That was the announcement today at the long-idle Vinyl Podcast site. The once-popular podcast is a victim of overzealous application of copyright collections.

The podcast, in it’s heyday, featured rare songs from old vinyl records. Music long out of print and unavailable except in the used record store… I caught the last couple shows before it went dormant and had assumed what this post confirms was the cause.

Read the article from the Vinyl Podcast page and check out the links to the BMI, ASCAP and Harry Fox pages to see the hoops a podcaster would need to jump through just to play traditional music legally. They’ve made it so cost prohibitive that noone will even bother.

Thankfully, there are a number of enlightened musicians who still control the rights to their own music and see podcasts as an opportunity to bring their music to the people, not an opportunity to strong-arm license fees out of podcasters. The sources of original music not wrapped up in the system are growing and the quality of that music is amazing.

Big music again is so focused on the bottom line that they don’t see that they are killing off their own industry.