Podcast music licensing (please help)

Hi guys,
I am wondering about music licensing in podcasts. I have a podcast where I discuss music trivia and I play the songs I'm discussing on it. I have contacted IMRO repeatedly to know what I have to do to get permission to play these licensed songs but cannot for the life of me get a straight answer out of them and I am at my wits end.
The first time I spoke to IMRO they told me that I didn't need a license but that the site on which my podcast was hosted needed to be licensed so I contacted a couple of sites but none of them seemed to know about the legality of playing the music and some sent me back to IMRO because IMRO sort out the legality for them.
I eventually started uploading the podcast to Podbean which is an American site. When I tried to link up my Podbean account with Spotify to make my podcast more easily accessible there was a disclaimer saying something like "I state that I have the permission to use all of the music in my podcast..." which I didn't have so I suddenly thought it was a bad idea to proceed.
From what I've read online it seems like American sites are a lot more tricky copyright-wise and I didn't want to find myself in any legal trouble over rights so I just stopped.
I have heard since that if I can get it on an Irish site that would be less messy but as I said, the Irish sites just told me to contact IMRO again to find out about the legalities so I'm kind of stuck in a very annoying loop.
But I do really want to get this podcast off the ground, I don't care if I have to pay for a license or whatever, I just want to do it without fear of being sued or playing peoples' music without permission.
Any help or insight you could offer would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks,
PS sorry if this was rambling, I'm new to this forum business