Podcasts are programs intended to be downloaded and listened to off-line. They are growing in popularity, but the general public, and some podcast producers, don't understand why it is illegal play music in a podcast. In real life, I advise a college radio station, so I need to know about copyright law. Our 250 watt radio station in a town of 5,000 people pays almost $1,500 a year for permission to play popular music on the air and in its streaming feed (to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC). That permission does NOT include other uses of the same music, such as in podcasts.
But in spite of the fact that podcasts have been around for a long time, the music industry has not created any way for producers to get permission to feature music in podcasts, except for a laborious process of licensing and paying or each song individually.
There are some websites out there that claim to offer "royalty free" music. But if you read their terms of service, it is for personal use only, and podcasts are sure to be treated as business uses, even of they do not contain advertising, and a growing number of them do.
Music licensing is something that under the radar for almost everyone in the general public. Yet, bars, any story that has note than six speakers connected to a system that plays music, and even university campuses all pay copyright fees for permission to play music. It is also the radio why "elevator music" is usually not the original artists.
Compliance with copyright is often a pain, but without the protections that come with copyright law, there would be no commercially recorded music, no movies, no TV, and little or no publishing business.
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