A radio station can play any commercial track tonight under one . A podcast that wants the same thirty seconds needs a file.
Radio runs on blanket licences: a single licence from each covering the whole repertoire, so the station never clears anything track by track. side and side are both metered and settled behind the scenes. That works because a broadcast is a performance, the use societies exist to license at volume.
A podcast is a different legal object. It isn't a transmission that happens once and is gone; it's a file. Every listener downloads or their own copy, on demand, from whichever platform carries the feed, anywhere in the world, for as long as the episode stays up. Fixing music into that file is reproduction, and shipping it to listeners is distribution. Societies don't blanket those rights for commercial repertoire. So each track needs a sync licence from everyone who controls the song (the permission to fix the song into new content) and a master-use licence from whoever owns the recording. It's the same two-sided clearance a TV placement needs.
Here's the counter-intuitive part. A primetime TV is often less paperwork than the podcast version of the same clip, because television comes with natural narrowing: a named programme, defined transmission windows, listed territories, a term. Each of those lets the licence, and the fee, be cut to size. A podcast has no edges to cut to. The feed is worldwide on day one, the archive is permanent by default, and the show plays on demand on every platform at once. The clearance has to be wide enough to match: typically all media, worldwide, in perpetuity, agreed separately with every rights holder on the track. All of it for one clip lasting half a minute.