I’ve found that one of the biggest challenges for those hoping to bring their content online is grappling with copyright. People who aren’t accustomed to working online can find it arduous to work around the laws pertaining to the photo, song or clip they want to use.
While Flickr has made finding Creative Commons photos pretty convenient, finding songs that are licensed for free use in educational/non-commercial use is a bit tougher.
Alan Levine, who was recently in town, has a great page of resources for CC-licensed songs that can be used for podcasting and digital storytelling. My favourite of these are CCHits and CCMixter. The offerings might leave you a little unsatisfied (the songs skew towards bad techno), but songs are being added all the time.
In terms of artists, Jona Bechtolt a.k.a. YACHT (who recently made waves [har har] with his MacBook Air case) released instrumental versions of albums by him and The Blow (his former band) free for you to remix, use for karaoke or use online. They can be found here. Very cool stuff.
Lastly, my friend Brian has told me a couple of times of a plan afoot at the great WFMU radio station in New Jersey to develop a repository of CC-licensed music. This would be a podcaster’s dream. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything concrete.