Coulton on Radio, World Ends in Fiery Apocalypse
On Friday afternoon as I was leaving for the train station (headed down to DC to visit with some old a cappella singing friends, ahem, more on that later), I got a call from a guy named David Lawrence. He does a syndicated radio show called the Net Music Countdown, which is a countdown show based on charts of online airplay and downloads. David’s chosen Ikea as the Net Unknown track for the next show, which is very exciting – no idea what stations you can get it on, but there is a podcast, so check it out. He also asked me to join him for some interview time on The David Lawrence Show last Friday night (7/1). We chatted about many things and he was kind enough to play a couple of my songs. He also did a lovely dramatic reading of the Ikea lyrics. I didn’t get a chance to post about it ahead of time, but you can listen to the mp3 online. Thanks David!
iTunes schmiTunes
Apparently the iTunes podcasting support is neither “all that” nor “a bag of chips.” For starters, so many new people found and downloaded the Little Gray Books podcast that our web host shut us down for the day. I know! And the same thing seems to have happened to a few other podcasts too. It’s a shame that the iTunes store doesn’t include support for Bit Torrent – of course it may never, because you-know-which organization (initials are RIAA) is a hulking, stinky, litigious monster, and even though Bit Torrent isn’t illegal as a technology, it sure does “induce” people to infringe on copyright. Meesa people gonna get sued.
And not everybody’s jazzed about the functionality or the mainstreamification of podcasting that ITMS brings. The Wizards of Technology had an interesting discussion about it with the makers of iPodderX in their most recent podcast. Seems that some rss details aren’t getting picked up right. And it also seems that the top 100 podcasts list on ITMS includes a lot of corporate stuff (some kind of deal with Disney) and not so much the indie-type shows. Is this the beginning of the end of free, amateur-produced podcasts?
All in all, I still think this is good for podcasting, even for us indies. It’s fun doing it for free, but you can’t really make a living that way. Just like blogging, podcasting is going to become one of the many ways we all get information and entertainment – just another medium. And some of it may cost money, and some of it will be done by companies instead of individuals, and that’s just the way it is. You’ll still be able to listen to what you want ,when you want, where you want (er, at least until they add DRM to everything).
Just, please lord, make sure Adam Curry’s OK.
Podcasting Mainstreamed!
Version 4.9 of iTunes now supports podcasts. I installed it today and had a look, and as expected they did a pretty good job. It’s integrated nicely into the iTunes store, so you can search for, download and listen to podcasts the same way you do songs. This is going to be interesting for the makers of current podcast managing software like iPodder and iPodderX because they now have to compete with free software from Apple. Gulp.
This also means that all of you people who have been afraid of the spooky spooky podcasting can now relax. Just pretend they’re mp3s (because they are) and that you can get them easily and freely in iTunes (because you can). You should really check out a few if you haven’t before, it’s all very exciting and indie and change-the-world-in-a-tiny-way. Also, be sure you search for and subscribe to the Little Gray Books podcast. I swear to God we’re going to do more of them.
Grokster Decision
Before I begin, I will say that I haven’t read the decision (too boring) and I am not a lawyer (too hard). Nonetheless, here is What I Think About This:
With a strange little sidestepping head fake, the supreme court has today ruled that makers of P2P software may be held liable for their users’ copyright infringement activities if the software was created with the intent of inducing users to infringe. Yipes. I think everyone expected them to uphold the old Sony Betamax decision that technology that had some infringing uses was OK as long as it had substantial non-infringing uses, and in fact the lower courts had used this as a precendent to rule in favor of Grokster and pals. But they pirouetted neatly around it by saying that it’s not about the technology, it’s about the intent and the business model and the marketing.
I’m kind of torn about this decision. While I do think it’s maybe not so good for a company to promote their software as a means to obtain free copyrighted material, this decision clearly makes it much scarier to make P2P software, even if you have completely non-infringing uses in mind. It’s just one more way you can get sued when you create innovative technology, and that’s probably bad for everyone. A decent, but certainly biased summary of this case can be read here at EFF.org.
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