"podcast" in Weblog

I thought that podcasting would take a while to take off… And by a while, I mean years. How many people have iPods? Yes lots, but how many people even have MP3 players? Still not a majority. Of those iPod owners how many know how to add podcasts from anywhere other than the iTunes music store interface? Very, very few, I think. It took me ages to find that text box hidden away in a dropdown into which I could paste feed urls. That means that the vast majority of podcasts, those further down the popularity curve (Long Tail anyone?!), will remain obscure. This morning it occurred to me that I might be wrong though.

The BBC is advertising podcasts on its World Service. News bulletins, documentaries, the works are all up for download. They were experimenting with this stuff when I freelanced for them 3 years ago but I just hadn’t noticed how completely they’d embraced it. With that sort of exposure, on a global scale, podcasts could be tipped (buzzword bingo!) into the mainstream far sooner than I was predicting…

I was listening to my favourite podcast (Radio SubPop) today and it got me thinking… It’s a series of tracks given away by a record label. Why? Aren’t they reducing their artists’ saleability by giving away all this music? They get none of the licensing money that they would from radio either and there are no adverts to sweeten it for them. What’s in it for them?

I remember being told by one of my friends that hardly anyone makes money from an indie single (unless you are Gnarles Berkeley) - they’re tools to help promote the album. Releasing a single requires a lot of effort: design, promotion, distribution. All for 500-2000 units shifted… It must be incredibly time consuming.

Now consider a podcast. It’s almost free to run and you have a base of subscribers from your target market receiving your music regularly. That must be the most cost effective album promotion possible. Consumers get some free music, the labels get some free promotion and everyone’s happy.

There are a couple of catches though. Where do they get these subscribers from in the first place? Some promotion is therefore required. Further into the future, what happens when podcasts have become a mainstream medium? Surely it’ll become increasingly difficult to get noticed as the big labels wade in with their hefty wallets. And finally, podcasts suffer from the same problem as RSS - pull technology reduces serendipidy. Why would you subscribe to a labels’s feed if you don’t know their music already?

So podcasts have their problems but the labels to crack them will have a year or more’s head start on the rest of the game… So far I’ve bought 4 albums after hearing singles on the Radio Subpop podcast and it’s not cost them anything to get me hooked.

The 37 Signals guys are travelling the world at the moment talking about how they made Basecamp but at least some of that knowledge is now available online from IT Conversations. I’ve not had a chance to listen to it yet but I’m assuming it’s going to be good - they really know what they’re doing. My only reservations is that I’ve heard they can be a little dogmatic about their approach - pushing Ruby at every opportunity, for example. It’s worth bearing in mind that there are many ways to skin a cat, and all that.