http://design.schoolofvisualarts.edu/weblog/

Eye candy for the ears?

It’s all real tasty. Perfect for Friday lunch listening.

I’ve always liked the fact that they let you listen to every show they’ve ever made for free as long as you streamed it off the web. The only problem was you had to use Real Player, which we all know is on it’s way down the tubes.

Luckily, I assume that partially due to an influx of popularity, leading to a forthcoming television show, leading to a better budget for the website, They’ve upgraded to a Flash Based MP3 player. Now you can actually jump the playhead to the part of the show you want to hear, and your stream is MUCH more reliable.

Also, They’ve started Podcasting all their New Shows, which we can assume will boost the sales of their old shows on Audible…

It’s just great to see that people are gradually getting this whole internet thing.
ROI for Podcasting hasn’t really proven it’s self, but I’d bet This American Life is making some money giving their product away for free.

It’s the Number One Audio Podcast on the iTunes Music Store, and it’s the Number Two Podcast Overall.

This American Life (and Car Talk) was on our list of “they need to podcast”. Problem is, the infrastructure of capital-P Public Radio prevents them. As I understand, the royalties paid to the storytellers doesn’t cover mp3 distribution. Not to mention the selling-to-affiliates business model.

But someone on the inside, with the power to do so, converted RealAudio streams to mp3s and uploaded the files to audio.wbez.org within a m3u file (mp3 playlist).

Jon Udell saw this and posted a link to both the m3u file and the embedded mp3.

In response, he received the following:

“We must ask you to immediately remove the This American Life MP3s that you’ve posted to the web. You’re violating our copyright, and we’re obligated to protect it.”

I once knew Sabrina, this black-as-midnight cat. As cats are want to do, she’d rub up against you and purr. Very sweet. Then, when you reached down to pet her – she’d hiss.

Seriously, way to go DNR. It’s nice to see government on the leading edge of web technologies for a change (and this is coming from somone who works in .gov web land ;o)

Recently, Brian mentioned that one of the songs he had played (a punkish cover of George Michael’s Last Christmas performed by The Hairy Bottlers) was a song he received directly from their label, Pate Records of Austria (I think this is their web site). Yes, an obscure song by an obscure band from an obscure label, but a label that knew a good thing when it saw it. The more labels that warm up to podcasting and the internet in general, the less RIAA and disgruntled consumers there will be.

The reality TV format removes the professional actor and writer while increasing reliance on editors.

What happens if we remove everything else; the expensive cameras, network affiliation, million dollar prize, and – dare I say – advertisements subsidizing everything we just cut out?

(it’s a half rhetorical question – cause it’s already half here)

P.W Fenton’s Rest In Peace installment of DigitalFlotsam.org proclaims the death of the major label recording industry citing these cease and desist letters as the first nail in the coffin.

This means podcasters will no longer do the marketing and promoting of major label-distributed music. It also means that if an artist wants to build a fan base a quickly as possible, they should avoid the record labels and just send mp3s to their favorite podcasters and start a podcast themselves. Independently. What Doc Searls calls the demand side supplying itself.

It’s been working for the Gentle Readers, Brad Sucks, Jonathan Coulton, the Lascivious Biddies, and Cruxbox – and it’s barely been a year.

There are more than 100,000 podcasts – and more each day – it’s nice of the major labels to hand the entire market over to independent musicians. That decision is admission of their irrelevance in this new our media world.

Now it gets interesting.

Update 22 Sep 2005: I’ve skimmed through them all and made it most of the way through Peter Merholz’s “Designing for the Sandbox” talk. This is the first time I’ve heard him explain the Sandbox metaphor. I half agree with the metaphor and I half think it’s inappropriate. I agree that the best we can do it provide people with ways to manipulate information in new ways – being open verses being closed. For me, ‘sandbox’ is synonymous with ‘skunkworks’ or ‘lab’. I’m a big proponent of organizations having designated places to explore and experiment. There’s an understood not-ready-for-primetime-ness to these places. That’s where PeterMe’s metaphor falls apart for me.

Overall, all the speakers sound like they were uncomfortable and unprepared. As if they were playing a public-speaking version of musical chairs and this person was unwillingly pushed behind the mic when the music stopped.