Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

Labels would make a fortune if they just set up an online license request store. Any track in various lengths for various prices. Once you pay, you're granted a license. Could take a few minutes for a podcaster to search a song, buy a license for the right length, and you're done. Have a URL that displays a license and instruct creators to put that at the bottom of their video/audio description. Then, any bots can scan for the license URL, verify its key as valid, and move on if the license is valid.

Charge affordable prices (e.g., $1 per second) and make it easy to use. This would take very little time at all and even if it's dirty, the catalog data and mp3s should exist for most stuff. Add a "this track can't be licensed" when data is missing and offer a "let me know" signup.

I have a friend who is a music supervisor. Navigating the web of rights and relationships necessary to license music is as much art as science. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as you describe (minus the convenient online platform), but from his telling, it more often involves a lot of begging, pleading, and favor trading.

Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.

That defeats the whole point of this issue. These uses are fair use, they shouldn't have to license anything. You can't teach music without playing it, Youtube is just allowing rights holders to make claims without any evidence or punishment for being wrong.

Fair use is the problem. It's too ambiguous and as a result lawyers can play the games they're playing. My solution is dirt simple, keeps everybody happy, and quits wasting time pretending we're living in 1998.