The new year is just a few days old and already there are interesting developments (which is nice in a time that's usually painfully slow). The Wall Street Journal's Ethan Smith reported yesterday that some major record labels and publishers have deals to license their songs for podcasts. Not surprisingly, the first are for corporate-sponsored podcasts.

"San Francisco-based Rock River Communications Inc. has struck some of the first deals to license major-label content for podcasts. Rock River, which specializes in making the mix CDs sold at the check-out counters of retailers like Gap Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc.'s Pottery Barn, is creating a series of promotional podcasts on behalf of corporate clients including DaimlerChrysler AG and Ford Motor Co.

Chrysler and Ford pay Sony BMG Music Entertainment -- the joint venture of Sony Corp. and Germany's Bertelsmann AG -- a flat fee, which the companies decline to disclose, for the right to distribute the podcasts for a year, regardless of how many or how few copies are downloaded. Users can keep the programs on their personal computers or MP3 players indefinitely."

Chrysler's podcast is/has been available at its corporate website as well as iTunes. The Ford podcast series will launch later this month.

Right now this is nothing to get overly excited about. While far short of the kind of solution so many labels hold out hope for, it's an important change and possibly a precursor to larger shifts. And it just plain makes sense. Labels and publishers should recognize the need for additional revenue, and hopefully they realize that a podcast -- a professionally-produced broadcast contained in a single, large file -- is not a replacement for commercially available digital tracks or albums.