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Indie Podcasters vs. Big Radio
skepticality writes "The weekly news and business magazine BusinessWeek has an article coming out in this weeks edition that highlights Skepticality, Coverville, AMP, and other indipendant podcasts and podcast networks. The article explains how a small number of indie podcasts are holding their own against the corporate and big-radio shows in the iTunes top 20 rankings." From the article: "In one of the shortest trajectories yet for a new Internet technology, podcasting has gone from the hands of indie developers to media giants in less than a year. Credit Apple. With typical finesse, it has created a centralized, easy-to-use service on iTunes that makes it a snap to find and listen to podcasts, the audio recordings that can be downloaded from the Net and played on a computer or portable music player. Apple also put out a new version of the iTunes software, which makes it easy for people to create their own podcasts, and invited all to post their creations on the site. Indie podcasters such as Kempenaar and Hallgren rejoiced, ready for the mainstream to embrace the technology they had championed."
Can we please stop calling these things 'podcasts'? They're downloadable mp3s, when did iPods start supporting only mp3? Why not call them rivercasts, or zencasts?
This is proof that people are looking for something original apart from the usual tasteless commercial soupe.
who hates the fucking "podcasting" name?
Its shitty audio streaming, not something one would expect to hear during some voyager technobabble.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
> The irony of podcasting is that it was created to circumvent big
> media companies.
says you in your naivete. look at the name ferchrissakes it is "podcast". If that's not a creation of Apple Computer then I don't know what is. It might look like it's not directly linked to Apple but with a name like that you can bet Apple was pushing for it in the background. check the money trail I bet you can see where it leads and it's not kansas.
a fake grassroots movement designed to look anti big media and all the little pseudo indies are lapping it up.
Bad example. Donald Trump is smoke and mirrors. He gets money from Asia to invest and then has to pay it back. His businesses are going broke so he choose to do a TV show as the only way to save himself from complete bankrupsy.
Podcasting, like a lot of other deployments of technology (think the Web), was a lot more useful before The Man got a hold of it. Before the new iTunes came along, we had places like iPodder.org and podcastalley to list podcasts, and on those sites it was all about indepedent podcasts. There were a few more "official" ones from radio stations and whatnot, but they just weren't as popular.
Now with iTunes it's back to the same techniques using marketing and flashy graphics for the iTunes banner thingy for a particular podcast, so the same masses that tune into clearchannel will click on these new links. And the worst part is now everyone thinks there "in" because they listen to a podcast.
I think it's sad to see the iTunes top 20 - it's mostly corporate overproduced junk. To me, the whole point of podcasting is to listen to what I want to listen to, not just have another medium for corporate radio junk. Most of the podcasts I listen to aren't even on the iTunes list at all because (oh, the horror) they might play material that is not properly licensed because of copyright issues. It's almost like I feel I have gone "underground" to listen to the *real* podcasts.
--- witty signature
Big radio is a dinosaur.
I have a radio in my car and one in my kitchen. Both are tuned to NPR and never go to any other station. The reason is two-part: One, I can't handle the advertisements, annoying personalities, and repetitive play of commercial radio, and two, I like NPR. Either way, I'll probably never listen to any of the mediocre programming elsewhere on my dial. I doubt I'm the only one.
Satellite radio will be part of the change. My guess is that Podcasting will also be huge. It's the radio's version of the Internet with TiVo. Users decide what they want to listen and when, they do it mostly without commercials, and they get to comment directly to programmers of the media.
Why would I want to listen to some schlock programmed by record company execs, peopled with screaming buffoons who can't stop laughing at toilet jokes, and peppered with advertisements for used cars?
Big radio is dead.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
It simply doesn't matter if 19 of the top 20--or even 99 of the top 100--shows are the product of "big media". The point isn't that podcasting provides an alternative to big media. It's that it provides alternatives, full stop. If your neighbor wants to do a show wherein he spends an hour each week just talking about his dog, Fifi, he can do it, and reach just about anyone in the world who wants to tune in.
Ten years ago, nobody could choose the Fifi Variety Hour. It isn't surprising that big media can garner the name recognition, advertising clout, market research, and (let's face it) talent to keep a large majority of people choosing their product. Podcasting is still a great leveller, because now they have to compete with every no-name garage DJ on the basis of product quality, rather than on the basis of "I have a radio station and you don't."
If some people only want to use podcasting as a convenient way to listen to radio programming, who cares? It doesn't detract from your ability to produce your own show, or my ability to listen to it. As the systems for matching people to interesting content improve (and boy will they ever), big media is either going to have to expand its offerings to cover a wide variety of new niches, or watch their audience reject them in favor of content that more precisely reflects their own interests.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I do understand the main point though. While internet audio shows are nothing new, look to Slashdot's Geeks in Space, circa seven years ago.
What makes "podcast" new is that there are now several easy to use programs that will automatically grab the latest audio shows that you listen to and automatically put it in your media player, and even automatically put them on your portable media player.
The old means of audio show distribution was more like standard TV distribution, it is there but you have to get it, automatically fetching subscribed shows makes it much more like Tivo.
I understand this automatic fetching really isn't that new either, there was a technology called "push". I'll admit I rejected push at the time, but I think it was because it was dreamt up by commercial interests, it looked to me to be loss of control. Maybe push as it was defined back then was bad, the best I can say that I didn't understand the basic idea until podcasts came about.
Now it looks like commercial interests might be pushing out the independents.
OK, so who feels threatened by this format?
Why the need for this denigration?
Unlike broadcasters podcasters have to pay for every listener (yes, there is blog torrent but it does limit the audience)
I live in a town (Canberra, Australia) which is off the map as far as music producers are concerned, yet nothing can get on the air if it hasn't come from the big studios.
So we gather around a condensor mic once a week. We drink some beer, we talk some crap, and we get local musos to come in and play their stuff.
We like how it sounds, quite a lot of audio snobs like how it sounds.
A few hundred people around the world like it enough they send us postcards.
Where's the harm?
We belch, fart, spark up, talk in away that would get a broadcaster thrown off the air and we ask nothing of you at all. So where's all this agro coming from?
To anticipate the next question the feed is here:
http://the-riotact.com/?cat=39
A summary of the content is here:
http://loadedog.com/pod/pod.shtml
(and quietly scope my karma and user number before accusing me of being some kind of shill)
To return to the point, some podcasts will be crap, some (ok a very few) will be good. Much like blogs. But as no-one is forcing you to listen, or blasting it through the local spectrum, what'ss the problem exactly?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
While I don't disagree that Apple can ALWAYS do a better job with their talent -- I would also say that iPodder is hardly acceptable compared to iTunes. iPodder is a total abomination and extremely confusing for users. iTunes doesn't bring podcasting mainstream simply because of its numbers -- it does so because it lets people finally say, "Oh, THAT'S how this shit works!"
:-)
Put an average person in front of iPodder (or any variation -- and I've used 'em) and they will either fall asleep or slit their wrists.
Only a Linux community would say that iPodder is "just as good."
Furthermore, advanced features are great and they'll be coming down the line I'm sure -- but keep in mind this is a 1.0 release if you think about it -- and it's already cleared products that were out for well over a year. That's pretty damn good in my book.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
After Apple made the iPod, along came the iRiver -- it's basically a cheap knockoff without the scroll wheel or iTunes music store support. If you want to buy music online to listen to with your iRiver, you have to be a Windows user.
Cheap? Nope, iRivers are more expensive than iPods by a large margin. Knockoff? No, iRivers aren't knockoffs because that implies low-quality. An iRiver is currently the top-of-the-range when it comes to MP3 players. And has a matching price.
iRivers primarily play MP3 files. Since when was MP3 windows-only? They can also play Ogg Vorbis and WMA, of course.
iTunes? Nah, I'll buy my music on CDs thanks. Once I've listened to it and decided whether it's worth buying, anyway. And with the accurate navigation buttons it has, I don't need to look at the player to see what I'm doing.
And for me, one area where you cannot in any honesty say that an iPod is better than an iRiver: Recording. Once music's recorded on an iRiver, due to Apple's DRM you can't get it off directly.
Other people's mileage may vary. But I don't believe anyone who's really looked into the issue can say that an iPod is any better than an iRiver - except price, and when you buy top-of-the-range goods you expect to pay for it.
An iRiver is as much a copycat of an iPod as, say, any mobile phone is of another, simply by virtue of having the same purpose.