Thanks to Patrick Crosley for the following e-mail:

I read with interest your recent post about the dubious distribution of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour through sites such as my own at Croz.fm. (“Stop giving my shows away”: Bob Dylan on “Theme Time Radio Hour” this week)

I am in agreement with your original position in that I don’t think Bob personally really minds, sort of: he has long understood that the forces at work in bootlegging are beyond his control and are a part of modern music making, for good or ill, and much more so now that there is this thing called the Internet. He might not like it, but it is part of the gig, so to speak, and it might not be all bad in terms of promotion and visibility. There is ironically named “The Bootleg Series” after all, a huge cash cow for Dylan and Sony-BMG.

I also note, and am constantly amazed and unnerved, that when you use Google to search for “theme time radio hour” my site is the fourth result after the official XM Radio Theme Time page, the Wikipedia article about the show and the official BBC Theme Time page. That has been the state of affairs since the first summer I started posting the shows back in 2006. Given those results it has been obvious to me me for a long time that not only are the powers that be within the Dylan and XM Radio camps aware that the shows are being widely shared, but they must know about my site specifically and they have decided to look the other way and let me keep sharing the shows. I do wonder why, but a quick bit of research would tell them that though my site has many enthusiastic fans they still only number a few thousand and in terms of an international radio audience that is really just a drop in the bucket. Perhaps they have decided (and assumed or ascertained) that with my posting the shows there is more of a benefit to XM Radio and to the artists that Bob plays on the show than a loss and so they ignore it.

I am not hard to reach via my site and despite my high visibility in the Theme Time world I haven’t heard a word from them yet. If they do contact me and ask me to stop sharing the shows I will stop posting them immediately and remove the archives that I have made available without question or rancor. I consider my activities in posting and hosting the Theme Time shows to be entirely at the whim and good graces of Mr. Dylan and the XM Radio people and I hope that they continue to let it go by.

So, there you go. Patrick makes an argument that had occurred to me, but which I don’t think I expressed, i.e. that the reason why a blind eye is turned to the free online sharing of “Theme Time Radio Hour” is that there are a relatively small number of people involved, and the enthusiasm of it all effectively promotes the show. Could be. Also, even if the more obvious sites on which the show is shared were halted from doing so, it would just move to the more untraceable and unaccountable places.

Well, I ended up writing so much about this issue only because I made an offhand remark in a post over a month ago, to the effect that it seemed like Bob didn’t mind the show being shared online. In the end, I don’t have a dog in the fight — even if there were a fight. Long may “Theme Time Radio Hour” continue, period.

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Addendum: Visitors coming via Norway may be interested in checking out some recent substantive posts related to Bob Dylan’s music, e.g.:

Prophets, octaves and blood

and Spirit On The Water, and a place you might call paradise

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