Did podcasting…die?

Once upon a time, there was excitement in the Land of the Podcasts. Books were written and flowed through the shipping departments of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. Dozens of podcast directories were dotted across the Internet. The technology attracted the attention of large companies such as Yahoo! and Apple. And in a small house on the south side of Chicago, a younger and more innocent author of this site began producing a podcast designed to showcase acoustic musicians he’d recorded himself.

That was many, many years ago, of course. At least three. With my recent reentry into the world of podcasting, I decided to do some research so this time, at least, I could get it right and perhaps build up something of a listener base. I purchased a book, Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, which came highly rated on Amazon.com. Although the book dated to 2006 (there were very few more-recent choices), I though to myself, “How much could things have changed?”

Ha.

I understand that technology changes quickly. But I’d wrongly assumed that, three years on, there would be more interest and greater opportunities in the world of podcasting. Imagine my surprise when I began typing in the addresses of the sites listed in the book, only to find that many had been replaced by those fake links pages (“thebestdoughnuts.com—the best of the internet and more”). Yahoo!’s podcast directory was gone. Many of the sites that remained from “the old days” were loaded with spam or hadn’t seen any updates for months or years.

To be fair, a few are left, but nothing that retains a level of user activity reflective of the kind of vibrant podcasting community that apparently once roamed the Great Plains in numbers that would shock visitors from the East.

Obviously, something had gone fundamentally wrong. So I started to dig a little deeper. I looked at books, I checked out websites, and although hard numbers are hard to come by, I started to put together an image of what must have happened to podcasting as a whole, and it boils down to one fundamental problem: incest.

Many of the references I found regarding podcast promotion focused on promoting your show to other podcasters. On some level, this makes sense. Why promote to people who have no interest? But let’s consider the following scenario:

Timmy produces a podcast about classic motorcycles. Tommy has a podcast about indie bands. Timmy offers Tommy a deal: play a promo from my show on yours, and I’ll play your promo on mine.

Great. So now Timmy listens to Tommy’s show so he can hear his promo played, and Tommy returns the favor. And they’ve both doubled their number of listeners, not counting their moms. Anyone see a problem with this business plan?

The key to successful podcasting, I think, is reaching people who wouldn’t ordinarily listen to podcasts. It’s not enough to target a community of hobbyists content with slapping each other on the back. And there’s the rub.

Now that the podcast community seems to have receded a bit, I humbly suggest that the (non-illusory) opportunities are actually greater than they were a few years ago. For one thing, there is less chaff to get in the way of finding the wheat, meaning that one no longer has to search through 1,000 podcasts to find one worth listening to repeatedly. Perhaps only 100. Still not a great ratio, but an improvement for sure, and that number can probably be reduced further by limiting one’s search to podcasts that have been regularly produced for a certain period of time. We can only assume that practice makes better, at least.

Additionally, Internet access is finally ready to become truly portable. Not only are many phones and laptops capable of grabbing the Internet pretty much anywhere, but the Internet-enabled car stereo is on the horizon, providing a potentially real alternative to satellite and terrestrial radio.

Time-shifting, the practice of listening to or viewing a show at a time other than when it is broadcast, is becoming part of our culture. Arguably, watching movies on videotape was the beginning of this trend, and now we’ve progressed to digital video recorders and on-demand programming. I watch House regularly, but I only recently learned what time it’s on and I have only a vague idea that it’s on Fox—the Tivo grabs it and I don’t sweat the details.

I suspect my situation isn’t uncommon. Listening to podcasts, via digital audio player or an Internet connection, provides the same level of convenience for what we might in the broadest sense call “radio.” I don’t even remember the last time I listened to “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! over the air.

Big-name radio types such as Steve Dahl and Adam Carolla have begun the heavy lifting—promoting podcasting to a whole new audience, i.e. that non-enthusiast gang that needs to get sucked in if the technology is going to become truly mainstream.

I created the Big Noisy Bug Movie Podcast with the goal of getting into the habit of regularly producing a show. It’s grown listeners at about the rate I expected, and although I don’t think it will ever be the most-downloaded podcast, I believe it’s improving over time. I have quite a few ideas for other shows, and over the next year I hope to begin producing several of them. If Internet radio does take off with the public, I plan to be on the ground floor.

In the meantime, want to swap promos?

‘Casting without the ‘Pod

In technological terms, “podcast” is a pretty bad name.

Why? Because podcasts became popular right around the same time as the iPod taking over the world. That relative plethora of pods leads many people to believe that podcasts and the iPod are tied together somehow, and that they need to own one in order to listen to the other. I find this confusion even among some computer-literate people, so don’t feel too bad, okay?

Just to save time, I’ve created a little mnemonic trick to help you remember that that’s not the case. Here it is: YOU DON’T NEED AN IPOD TO LISTEN TO PODCASTS. Okay, that’s not really a fun mnemonic on the order of Roy G. Biv (red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet: the colors of white light when it’s broken apart as in a rainbow) or “She made Harry eat onions” (the Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario). Still, it’s just as true, and just so you don’t forget, I’ll run it past you one more time: YOU DON’T NEED AN IPOD TO LISTEN TO PODCASTS.

So what do you need? It’s got to be kind of complicated right? Actually, assuming you have speakers connected to your computer, you have everything you need right in front of you.

First, click this link. Seriously. It won’t bite and I promise you won’t get Rick-rolled or be forced to send any money to Nigeria. Done it? Okay, on the page that came up, you’ll see a list of links. They’ll be labeled something silly like “Episode 10 – The Life of Emile Zola (1937).”

Find a link that piques your interest and click on that. You might hear audio right away, or you might have to click a “play” button, which looks like a little triangle pointing to the right. That’s it. You’re now listening to a podcast!

To answer your unasked question…yes, you can also listen to a podcast on an iPod. You can listen on almost any digital music player ever made. The iPod is just one option, but almost anything will work, including that bulky computer on which you’re reading this.

What’s the difference between a podcast and a plain ol’ audio file on a website? Not much, really. The podcast comes with a little code that lets some web browsers and other software programs look around on the Internet to let you know when there’s a new episode. That’s it! That’s what we mean when we say you can subscribe. You don’t have to. It’s just a way of making things more convenient. Like a Tivo for audio.

So my advice is, don’t get too hung up on the word “podcast.” Especially the “pod” part. It’s just a word, like “table” or “femur” or “aglet.” The important thing is that you can hear it. Now go out and see if you can find a few more! There are some good ones out there. But don’t forget to come back and listen to ours. Or better yet, subscribe!

Danny Federici died this week

One of my favorite albums of all time is Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.” His first album–the one that would later produce a string of hits for Manfred Mann–hadn’t sold so well, and the band was reduced to making its next record in a way-off-the-beaten-path studio with a creaky piano.

It’s hard to describe, but the album has a…a sound. Springsteen was 24 when he made it, and it’s one of those rare recordings, kind of like the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul,” in which you can tell that the artist really hasn’t made up his mind what he’s going to end up sounding like yet.

The result is an album that contains hard pumping blues, goofy disco horn rock, and sappy, jazz-infused folk ballads. I love it. I spent a million hours as a teenager laying in my room with a pair of gigantic headphones on, listing to it by the glow of the stereo.

One of the keys to that album is Danny Federici. For much of his career, he was Springsteen’s “other” keyboard player, taking a back seat to Roy Bittan. But in the early days, his organ and accordion playing (yeah, that’s right–accordion) were a fundamental part of the band. He was never flashy, but he was always there, and it’s hard (okay, impossible) to imagine what songs like Sandy or Wild Billy’s Circus Story or Backstreets would have been without him.

For the last three years or so, Danny Federici had been fighting melanoma. In November of last year, he left the Springsteen tour to pursue treatment. On March 20, 2008, he made a brief, surprise return in Indianapolis, and played accordion on Sandy. On Thursday, he was gone.

“The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle” is part of what made me me. Danny Federici was a big part of that. I’ll raise a glass in his honor and wish him well on his journey. He’ll be missed.

It doesn’t count if you don’t fall down

I went out yesterday and bought myself a pair of ice skates. I haven’t owned my own skates since I was a child, although my friends and I spent about three years of our high school existence hitting the Oak Lawn Ice Arena every Friday night.

As an aside, this was actually much cooler than it sounds. Friday nights at the ice rink meant they turned out all the lights except for some colored mood lights mounted on the side walls. Then they planted a couple of rather massive speakers directly on the ice, and for several hours a DJ would blast loud rock and roll throughout the building. The place was filled with women who, granted, were usually dressed in outerwear, but many were cute and even if the cute ones didn’t show up it was fun to slam your friends into the side panels while Jimi Hendrix roared in the foreground.

Since that time, I haven’t skated much. I went back to the rink a few years after high school, and it was a shell of it’s former self—a bunch of kids skating in circles with all the lights on, some radio station playing through a tiny speaker in the ceiling. Like all things cool, my ice skating experience had been mellowed out by The Man.

But I’ve always liked ice skating. Note that liking something and being good at it are often two different things. I even went through an abortive phase a few years ago in taking my step-son Nick to the rink on Saturday mornings. One, I thought he might enjoy it, and two, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to know how to skate.

One of the things I’ve wanted for a long time was a pair of my own ice skates.

Don’t get me wrong. The Park District skates have come a long way since the worn out leather boots that we used to wear. The new ones are padded and much more comfortable, and they give better ankle support, which is a serious consideration when you haven’t skated in ten years.

But having your own skates means they’re always sitting by the door, ready for action. It means you take skating a little more seriously, even if you still suck at it. It means that when you do skate, you have a little more control over the quality of the experience. And it means less of a chance to contract some sort of fungal foot disease.

So I went to the local sporting goods discount store, and they had skates on sale for 25% off. I ended up with a pair of so-called “recreational” skates. The main difference between these and figure skates, from what I can tell, is a lack of a toe pick—that serrated thing at the front of the blade.

Truth be told, I was a little intimidated by the baldness of the blade. I’ve never played hockey, so I’ve never gotten used to hockey skates. I wasn’t sure how much my skating “technique,” such as it is, might depend on the presence of those tiny ridges. I should point out that I’m not so cool that I wouldn’t have been willing to buy a pair of men’s figure skates, but try finding the damn things in a regular sporting goods store sometime.

Today, I went up to the Oak Lawn Ice Arena. Not the same one that we had when I was a teen. The original one burnt down years ago. Don’t ask me how a steel building filled with ice can catch fire. I don’t know, and I probably don’t want to know. I suspect the answer has something to do with insurance and lots of kerosene. In any event, I went to the new one and skated my ass off for an hour-and-a-half this afternoon. It was cool. Well, at first it was cool. Then it got warm, and then it got downright toasty and wet. But I had fun, and if I keep doing this, which I will now that I have my own skates, I really will skate my ass off. After eating 75 lbs. of Christmas cookies over that last month, that can only be a bonus.

Goodbye Johnny Frigo

I read that Johnny Frigo died this week. He was 90 years old, so I guess it wasn’t unexpected. Don’t worry if you don’t know who he was. I didn’t either, until he showed up to perform for us a couple of years ago in one of my live sound classes at Columbia College.

Johnny played a number of instruments. He was a first-call bass player in Chicago during the ’60s and ’70s. He eventually hung that up because he didn’t feel he could compete with the youngsters anymore. At that time, he returned to his first instrument, the violin, and basically made a whole new name for himself at an age when many of his peers were moving into retirement homes.

When he visited my class, he told a story about performing in a dance hall when he was just a teenager. At that time, he was playing upright bass, and he would carry this giant instrument on the bus to the club where he was working on the north side. If he played well, patrons would tip him by throwing coins in the f-holes of the bass. When he got home, his brothers would help him shake the bass to get the coins out.

One night, someone inserted a bill in the f-hole. Johnny didn’t remember if it was a five or a ten, but either way it was a lot of money for a teenager back in the ’20s. He told us that he and his brothers had a terrible time trying to get the bill to fall out. The next night, when he went back to the club, he told the owner about how someone had given him such a big tip. The owner replied, “Yeah. That was Al Capone!”

Johnny played with just about everyone from his era, including the Dorseys and Chico Marx and Frank Sinatra. When he died, he still had gigs scheduled.