Audio and Podcasts

Whoa! Mitch Ratcliffe, loaded to the gunnels with sarcasm, ripped the stuffing out of Adam Curry and to a lesser extent, Dave Winer, on the latest Web Talk Radio show/podcast (Feb. 12, 2005). In the show itself, Dana Greenlee is heard to remark "I hear he (ie: Curry) charges for meetings..."

Blogging after the fact, Mitch says:
"Apparently, I was too hard on Adam Curry during my appearance on WebTalk Radio last weekend. I was having some fun at the expense of the legend of the invention of podcasting, which involves a lot of credit being attributed to Curry and Dave Winer when, in fact, it was the result of a lot of incremental changes in production, hosting and syndication tools. Listeners objected..."

I have mixed feelings about Curry myself these days. He can be entertaining to listen to, but then there are programs where he is so clearly fogged by his latest score that I feel sorry for him and just click through to the next podcast. But is that not the beauty of the medium?

Matt May has posted an excellent summary on the podcast music royalties/rights issue over at his site; bestkungfu weblog. He details the steps required for podcast music play in the US, a topic I have covered in previous Bradcasts. The key point is that the new reference to "pod-casting" in the ASCAP license does not add clarity. I think ASCAP's latest license revision makes things a whole lot worse. Where did they get this "60 second" rule from? And what is the stuff about not having playlists or program guides about? It is almost like saying: 'We want you to remain rank amateurs and we want your money'. Another point to note is that any linked MP3 file will play on the default client when it is clicked -- so how can that be "non-interactive"? ASCAP judiciously ignores the mechanical rights issue -- after all, that is not part of their sandbox -- but it would be helpful if these rights agencies got together and provided a clearing house for licensing.

Matt has also harpooned what may become a big issue for podcasters in a year or three -- playlist history. I can see an international team of lawyers sponsored by a group of music rights associations and maybe a large broadcast association going after the top podcasters who are playing rights protected music.

In Canada, as I noted in Bradcast 2, there is currently no mechanism for collecting royalties for artists or composers by way of podcasts. In the absence of a regulation, rights protected music should not be played on a Canadian podcast. It's not good for the artists but maybe by the end of 2005 we will have a new regulation in place. Be forewarned, SOCAN is looking for at least 25 cents per song per download (go to page 22 and 23). That is a steep price and one that will deter me from playing rights protected music.

Podcasters beware. Track the music you play along with its license permissions. Track your downloads. Somebody else will be doing it too.

This morning's Go (01/29/05) on the CBC features the scholarly Lister Sinclair riffing between "The Masterpieces of Disco". What a concept! Thanks guys.

Nobody called me for any records, so I'm guessing that CBC music/record librarian Adrian Shuman was listening to my radio shows ("The Disco Source") all those years ago. (Adrian also got his radio start at CFMU-FM 93.3 at McMaster.)

Brent: Your assertion that Canada did not produce many disco masterpieces is not correct. So -- although you played France Joli -- you completely missed the genious of Gino Soccio.

One song featured on the show was "Let Me Take You Dancing", by Bryan Adams -- one of his earliest releases and it pre-dates his "rocker" image. The high-octave vocals by Adams on that record were not a result of his not having hit puberty (he was 18 or 19 when that was recorded). The vocal tracks were pitched up in speed. Years later it seems like a brilliant move; nobody seems to recognize Adams voice when that record is heard now, thus allowing him to shrug off his nascent disco career. I interviewed Bryan -- god where is that tape, somewhere in the basement -- in 1979. In that interview Bryan says "Yeah, I really like Disco..."

I'm kicking off a new list of distinction and we all that know there are not enough lists in the world. This list will be known as The Eh! List and will be reserved for interesting podcasters that you really should be listening to. Here are the rules:
1) An Eh! Lister can not be a "pioneer" as defined by the ipodder directory
2) I can not be an Eh! Lister.
3) Preference will be shown toward 'casters that display a sense of professionalism (even if they are amateurs), understand the nascent business possiblities of podcasting and, more than occasionally, actually have real content in their podcasters.

Our first Eh! Listers are:
Effern of the The Sound of Vision
Tim and Emile Bourquin of the Podcast Brothers

The Eh! List will sit as a block to one side or the other of this web site so that you can always link directly to their web sites. I will try to keep their podcasts on tap in "The Brad Gibson Radio Network" (my GigaDial Station).

Effern's latest podcast references Michael D. Pollock at smallbusinessbranding.com. Pollack has created YAM ('yet another manifesto') about -- you guessed it -- small business branding. In the manifesto Pollack says, paraphrasing the Doc; "Forget Marketing. Think Conversations."

I think what the Cluetrain guys said was that markets -- not marketing -- are conversations. To get ridiculously glib about this, go to a market. A real market with tomatoes, chickens, lemons and stuff. Are people meeting and conversing there? Now think about meeting places, clearing houses and exchanges of all kinds. Ask the same question.

Marketing is not a verb describing the action of conversing in a market. If I'm there trying to get you to buy my chickens, I'm selling; I'm not marketing. We're already at the market. Modern marketing is about getting somebody to the market and that is usuallly not a conversational activity. It's a broadcast activity that is often accomplished with advertising. As soon as I respond to a broadcast activity the sales cycle has begun. Now a conversation has started. We're haggling. That's why the so-called buzz marketers are running into such heat these days. They're not really marketing; they're hustling because they're paid sales agents.

It's not surprising that we confuse sales and marketing activities. This is an era where ponzi schemes are celebrated as "MLM opportunities" (ie: multi-level marketing) and door-to-door slam artists are referred to as "marketing representatives".

Thanks for getting me to rattle my brain on this one Michael; some of the other manifesto points are as equally thought provoking. Unfortunately I disagree with most of them. Well worth the visit.

Doug Kaye recently posted some thoughts on podcast advertising:
"This is a topic I

Effern gets Scobleized! When I said that he was putting together a good podcast I wasn't kidding. Part 1 was full of great info and Part 2 had Doc Searls in it -- say no more. What really got me was that Effern kicked off the Doc interview with a reference to an entry on my blog. The "Aw-right" meter is pegging the top of the scale. Many thanks.

So let's help out the Sound of Vision by breaking the bandwidth barrier... If you need more, I'll host the MP3's for the podcast on one of my domains.

The podcast directory at ipodder.org should be the center of the podcast world. Key podcast clients like Doppler and ipodder rely on the OPML (an outliner format that is XML based) feed at ipodder.org to offer the full range of podcasts from within their programs. I have experimented with an XSL transformation that can crawl the ipodder OPML and provide some more descriptive information on each of the podcasts. It sort of works (see the results here from November's crawl). I tried the crawl again a few days ago and had terrible problems with a number of special characters from other languages. I was forced to rip out a number of the entries in order to finish the crawl. In addition, many OPML links can still not be crawled due to the encoding problems. (Take a look -- it's not pretty. Technology and Travel nodes still cannot be crawled). Not good; especially when you see that both Doppler and ipodder clients have been crippled by the same problems. As of today, none of the major clients can crawl the full directory.

You know, it's great to claim that OPML can pull together a number of disparate nodes and allow editing of the directory by dozens of people but the problem now is that we have encoding and character-set problems. I think the ipodder directory needs to standardize on a language and a character encoding scheme that is universal (I vote for English and UTF-8). This needs to get done pretty soon or else there will be a further erosion of faith in the ipodder.org directory. Locations like podcastalley.com are ostensibly doing a better job right now. The promise of an open and crawl-able directory is great but it's time to take the Babel out of it.