Yesterday I received an e-mail from Amazon Music/Audible to the contact address for Shades of Brown that started like this:
Hello Podcaster,
We’re excited to let you know that Amazon Music and Audible will be adding podcasts to our respective services, including Amazon Music’s free tier. Please note that this information is confidential. In advance of launch, we would like to invite you to make your podcast(s) available on our services. Agreeing to add your content ensures your podcast(s) will be available to Amazon Music’s rapidly growing audience of over 55 million customers.
First things first: confidential? How is this confidential exactly? You sent this non-directly addressed e-mail to our contact address which I presume you either scraped from our site or from another podcast directory. There is no NDA here or any other kind of contract.
So I clicked through to their submission form and one of the pages has a “Content License Agreement” that you have to agree to if you want your podcast to show up in the Amazon Music/Audible podcast directory. One of the clauses I strictly object to:
Content Restrictions. Your Content may not (a) include advertising or messages that disparage or are directed against Amazon or any Service; (b) include advertising that does not comply with Amazon’s Creative Acceptance Policies, which Amazon may update from time to time and which are currently located at https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/en/creative-acceptance#generalcreativeguidelines (and any successor or related locations designated by Amazon); (c) promote or contain pornography or sexually explicit, obscene, violent, harassing, discriminatory, libelous or defamatory materials, or content that in our judgment is inappropriate or offensive; (d) promote, facilitate or undertake illegal or potentially illegal activities or (e) violate or infringe or promote the violation or infringement of any intellectual property, proprietary, or other rights of any person or entity. Amazon will not embed any advertising in or re-host your Content.
I bolded the objectionable subsection for you. Really Amazon? Really? I can’t include ads or messages that dunk on Amazon if I want to include our podcast in your podcast directory? No, just no. Fuck all the way off.
Shades of Brown will not be in the Amazon Music/Audible podcast directory until this non-disparagement clause is removed. I encourage others to not put their podcast on their directory as well. This kind of thing is not acceptable.