Tag Archives: media

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Podcast

I was first intro­duced to pod­cast­ing by Todd Burns, my edi­tor at [Sty­lus Magazine](http://stylusmagazine.com). He was way out in front on that, bring­ing read­ers the Sty­cast far more often than they deserved. Sure, it may have sound­ed like a painful eye prob­lem, it was much fur­ther ahead of its time than I realized. 

Since then I’d describe my rela­tion­ship with pod­casts as aspi­ra­tional; I treat them like I would chal­leng­ing books or a Bela Tarr movie. I find myself load­ing up on inter­est­ing shows that are all over the map, only to find the badge of unheard shows grow­ing dai­ly. I’d delete them from my iPod and for­get about them for months before skulk­ing back to them like I need­ed to take my med­i­cine. What was it about them that turned me off? 

Were they too ama­teur­ish? Too pro­fes­sion­al? Sim­ply too long?

While they may not have become the enter­tain­ment jug­ger­naut the pod­cast pio­neers thought they might become, pod­casts have come of age rather nice­ly. There are sev­er­al I lis­ten to reg­u­lar­ly, includ­ing Jesse Thorn’s Bulls­eye, a few Ear­wolf shows and The Low Times, host­ed by Philly ex-pats Mag­gie Sero­ta and Daniel Ral­ston, along with some guy Chuck Wool­ery blocked on Twit­ter. I’m also watch­ing a few from TWiT.tv in an effort to get more out of my iPhone and iPad. See? I told you I was aspirational!

I still over­reach: will I ever real­ly lis­ten to the Leonard Lopate show? Some episodes of The Moth are so serious!

What are your favorites? Tell me about them!

Music 2.0’s Blue Sky Mines Collapsing

Blender’s print edi­tion is fin­ished. You prob­a­bly already know this if you spent any time on the Inter­net yes­ter­day, but it’s just anoth­er instance where a music mag com­plete­ly changes its appear­ance to remain “rel­e­vant” (what­ev­er that means now) and ends up clos­ing shop any­way. As Matos wrote on his blog, “It’s hot, it’s sexy, it’s dead,” which sounds like the sort of thing one might say about the pre­ma­ture death of a rock star.

Part of my music cru­sade has been to say how impact­ful events like this are for the music indus­try. There’s a great com­ment in the Idol­a­tor post on Blender’s clos­ing from the friend of an anony­mous flack who does­n’t know which out­lets will be left to pitch by year’s end. It’s that bad. That out­look, cou­pled with the indus­try’s retreat from pro­mo­tion in the name of rev­enue, viz. videos holed up on Youtube with no embed­ding priv­i­leges and the like, music will soon be hard­er to find than bin Laden!

Heck, even the thing peo­ple seem to enjoy most about music online is chang­ing. Last.fm announced this week that they’ll be chang­ing their stream­ing poli­cies in many parts of the world, set­ting off a tidal wave of out­rage. Pow­er­ful music search engine See­q­pod will begin charg­ing devel­op­ers for its data, too. Omi­nous nois­es are com­ing out of the Imeem camp, too, no mat­ter what they’re telling Michael Arring­ton at Techcrunch.

Those of us who fore­saw the end of Music 2.0 can only shake our heads. Chris Ander­son­’s “freemi­um” dream is over. The blue sky mines are col­laps­ing around our ears.

What’s ahead? No one knows. I’m talk­ing to my friend Jason Her­skowitz almost dai­ly about the future of music on the web, espe­cial­ly around music dis­cov­ery. He’s been work­ing on some cool stuff late­ly, most recent­ly Play­dar, an idea I urge you to check out. Nev­er­the­less, he fears that Dark­net will soon replace any­thing remote­ly legit­i­mate for con­tent shar­ing online. It’s a fright­en­ing propo­si­tion for rights hold­ers who have any inter­est in pro­tect­ing their prop­er­ties in this brave new world, and equal­ly scary for those of us who care about music as part of our cul­tur­al fabric.