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How Podcasting and Satellite Changed Radio
prostoalex writes "Business Week magazine discusses how podcasting changes the radio industry: "Consider the basics: With no licenses, no frequencies, and no towers, ordinary people are busy creating audio programming for thousands of others. They're bypassing an entire industry."
The article notes about some advertising deals that podcasters managed to procure, but it also notes that another industry, satellite radio, represented by Sirius and XM Satellite radio, is already changing the radio landscape."
Another inane buzzword fad cooked up by the idiotic blog crowd. WTF is so special about downloading audio files of these morons talking?
I'm in the WTF boat myself.
:-)
But then, I stopped listening to radio years ago- I pull my weather from the *.gov, and get everything else through iTunes and the internets. I once heard podcasting described as "an audio blog"- my response was something along the lines of "just what I want to hear- more talk radio."
Blogs have given us a few million Spider Jerusalem wannabes- podcasting and cheap cams will give us a few million Edison Carter wannabes. While technology has decimated the entry barrier and given any medium to anyone with enough motivation to make a try for it, it's done nothing to make it easier to sort through the crap and find the good stuff (example- webcomics. Finding a good webcomic that's not run by someone who's even better at marketing is a crapshoot).
Stern, Limbaugh (sp?), et. al. irritate the everloving crap out of me- if I wanted a cult-of-personality circlejerk I'd buy a TV and watch the local news. Those jackoffs can't seem to get their faces off of billboards, and they look a few notches up the percieved quality scale from all of the radio "personalities" splattered across same. Stern went to XM- that's good, he can stay there. I don't miss him. If podcasting is similar, then I'm so far out of the demographic that I'm orbiting pluto.
If I really want talk radio, I can pipe an infobot or eliza through a speach synthesizer and be done with it.
"Consider the basics: With no licenses, no frequencies, and no towers, ordinary people are busy creating audio programming for thousands of others. They're bypassing an entire industry"
They'd sue you, buy your congressmen to get the laws changed, and consider you a criminal for being enthusiastic about the art and the industry.
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... is that these "specific formats" typically consist of a 200 song playlist. There were a hell of a lot more hit singles in the 80s- nevermind hit albums or hit artists.
:-| And College Radio can't get the OMFG TECHNO OMFG GANSTA RAP OMFG HIPPY MUSIC out of their systems either.
I listened to the local Clear Channel Alternapop Earcock a couple of days ago for the first time in months... in a thirty minute span, I didn't hear anything I haven't heard a few hundred times before, and years previously. Last I checked, Radiohead has written more songs than "Creep"- but you wouldn't know it to listen to these asshats.
When I got to this town (Pittsburgh) in 1997, there was a Jazz station parked at 104.{5|7}. It was nice and I listened to it quite a bit... until one day it magically Changed Format to hiphop/r&b. Just like that. A few years later and that frequency is a black hole of Rod Stewart / Michael Bolton-esque soft rock.
Radio's great when you're in the serviced demographic- if you're noti, it's a vast, staticy wasteland.
And if the masses move, the government is going to go for regulation, even of content. If they do that, the only thing that will change is the method of distribution.
I'd be more worried about Sirius' new boss Mel Karmazin, he was a sales guy at Infinity and has hired more salesmen than a commercial free service needs.
It seems pretty obvious to me that as things continue on the current trend that it won't be too much longer that "videocasting" and the like will start to upset the right people in TV and Cable land . I could easily see that the only thing you have to pay for is bandwidth (which is enough in and of itself) and anyone with a server, the bandwidth, and a video camera could start "broadcasting" their show over the internet. Commercial (I know of the free ones as well, but that is another topic entirely) products like "Windows Media Center" that are sold in stores will make it so that the average user can now watch Star Trek New Voyages on their TV. If you want your fan films to show up, you just have to plug into their API and WAMO! you've got a million viewers (certian assumptions made...like its worth watching). I think the "numa-numa" kid, and the jedi-kid prove that this is where things are heading. The real question is, how much kicking and screaming will the "traditional" broadcasting folk make? or will they jump on the bandwagon?
Podcasting and satellite radio are ways to deliver topical content and new music to your ears without too much work.
Satellite radio has general news, talk, and live sports covered. The music channels give you essentially a self-updating playlist in a huge number of genres you'd never have time to keep up with on your own.
Podcasting offers the promise of very specialized topical content. Think of a talk show that covers very narrow areas of interest. Things much too specialized to ever be "broadcast".
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Podcasting really needs a better name. The 'pod' bit, is just another commercial plug for Apple. It wouldn't be acceptable to call all PCs 'Window-machines', would it? Or websites 'Internet Explorer sites'?
You might as well call Kleenex "tissues", call a Xerox machine a "photocopier", or a Band-aid a "bandage". The iPod has the vast majority of the market share and mind share for digital music players, and it's not going away.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
The entire point of Howard Stern leaving broadcast radio was partially because he was sick of being harassed by the FCC, thanks to extremist right-wing Christian groups. The government is not regulating cable, and will not be regulating satellite radio any time in the near future. With Cable, advertising dollars fuel it, and advertisers aren't willing to pay for anything they deem as risky during the day. With Satellite, it's subscriber based and not advertisement based, like cable's pay-per-view, so the dynamics are completely different and your blanket statement does not apply here.
That's why you'll start hearing about "podcast safe" music - usually by independent artists or small labels that explicitly give permission for their songs to be included in a podcast.
Hopefully podcasters will keep this under control so that the paid for leaches in congress don't start passing legislation that would hurt this.
For public radio stations and alternative news/music organizations podcasting is awesome! I could see some podcast producers being picked up by radio show distributors. Coverville, for example, would be an excellent show even on terrestrial radio.