Content by Anthony Dockrill
Last week I wrote about how copyright was used to strangle the radio industry as podcasting and streaming took hold. This week I’m exploring how the radio industry’s very own copyright may be being used against it.
One of the great aspects of radio is that the cost of entry for our audience is largely zero. Yes, you need a radio or a connected device, but once you can receive audio content, your credit card is left in relative peace. This free distribution of content is a feature, not a bug, of radio. It’s created a rich, vibrant and egalitarian medium.
Nothing is really free in this world – minus advice from your friends. So, while you might not be paying directly for free audio programming, you’re covering the cost through listening to ads or paying a few cents worth of tax each day for the ABC and SBS. I might be biased, but I think that’s a good deal. It’s also meant that the radio industry has put minimal restrictions on accessing our content.
Yes, there is copyright law, but in recent years these laws have been regularly broken by tech companies far larger than any of the media companies working in the audio space.
Last year, the Hard Fork podcast interviewed an academic working at Google who was developing a new research tool called NotebookLM that, among other things, could create a short podcast based on the material you fed it.
It was meant to be a convenient way to absorb information and help with research. This makes sense in many ways because audio is a great way to take in information. However, the wheels in my radio brain quickly started turning.
A large language model is only going to be able to produce podcast content if it has been trained on audio material – and lots and lots of it.
Let’s go back to the beginning: the radio industry freely gives away its content. Accessing our material is a breeze, but do we restrict its use? Do we have long warning messages at the beginning of our programs about what constitutes acceptable use?
It would be naive in the extreme to think that large tech companies are not eyeing off the audio industry, particularly given the levels of growth this sector has enjoyed in key parts of its market. It’s one of the few bright spots in the media landscape. The tech companies are not out of line to want to move into the audio world – after all, they’re just looking after their own investors. And let’s face it, we invited them in by giving away our content.
If large tech companies come to dominate audio in the coming decade, we may come to regret that we so freely gave away our content for these models to be trained on. Can we close the gate, or has the horse bolted?
Take a listen to this four-minute clip of audio above produced by NotebookLM – I’ve used the first part of my series on How Radio Got Owned as the source material. The clip was produced in a couple of minutes with no input from myself.
After you listen to the clip, remind yourself this system is no longer state of the art. In fact, in AI terms it’s ancient, and Google is no longer developing it.
What is cutting edge in 2025?
I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that question. Maybe it’s time you spoke with legal about putting some clear restrictions on the kinds of uses of your audio content. But without major lawsuits and legislative changes, the horse bolted long ago.
Anthony Dockrill is a Digital Producer at Pod Jam and the former Program Director of 2SER FM Sydney.