There’s a lot of great radio out there, but the radio is one of the worst places to find it. As a distribution channel, radio is an ever more narrow and annoying pipe that has to homogenize and consolidate its product in order to save its business. Which makes for a worse air product.
What’s amazing is that during the very year we’ve lamented the market dominance of Clear Channel, there are so many cool and satisfying alternatives to radio-as-usual to choose from.
Check out PRX.org. This site officially makes a market between independent public radio producers and public radio stations: program creators upload hundreds of original shows they hope stations will license and air. But what it does for the rest of us is let us all listen to wonderful, passionate radio programming while going around the constipated trickle that is your local public radio station. You register for free, agree to review shows you listen too, and you’re on your way to a candy shop full of great documentaries and original programming.
Don’t get me wrong--- I love public radio and adore my local station. But there are far more cool producers of programs and listeners with many unique interests than there is airtime. Most of this stuff would never see the light of day without an alternative distribution channel like PRX. They also hope that members’ reviews will give shows buzz and authority--- which will give station managers the confidence to air them. My favorite show so far is The Creative Remix an hour long documentary by Benjamen Walker that examines the roots and creative power of mix culture, and the implication for artists of the titanic intellectual property battles of mix culture. One reviewer called it “a perfect radio show.” (At some point public radio will realize that local station airtime is but one distribution channel, and in the long run it may not be the most valuable one. )
The only down side to PRX is that you have to listen to the stream on your PC; it's not podcast and they don’t post MP3s to download unless you’re a radio station member. But for $16.00, try downloading Audio Hijack for Mac--- which turns Real Media streams into MP3s and places them directly in iTunes where they are synched with an iPod. ( PC Users can use Real Media Recorder for Windows to create MP3s for portable devices)
The current darling of this alternative-to-radio trend podcasting, a phenomena which is enjoying one of the steepest ramps from Not Existing to Major Tipping Point Contender in the history of media or computing. Podcasting marries internet audio with RSS content syndication --- and enables audio shows to flow from content creators to your iPod or similar MP3 device automatically. It instantly turns the millions of iPods and MP3 players into an addressable audience for any kind of audio programs. And it's free.
The idea was hatched by a techie (Dave Winer, syndication architecture maven) and a content guy (Adam Curry, of MTV fame). On September 4th 2004 at 23:40 universal time, Curry registerd ipodder.org for software to make the system work. (And shortly after that, other coders vastly improved Adam’s original code, so the systems works great now on Mac, Windows, and Linux)
On October 8th Wired News wrote about the podcasting---- and noted that interest in the phenomena was growing “almost exponentially.” A Google search of the term yielded 8,000 references to podcast. The number had been only 5,200 a day earlier, when the writer began work on his story.
On November 6th, during his session on podcasting at the Blogercon III conference in Palo Alto, Curry checked Google; there were now 187,000 references to podcasting.
As I write this on November 14th, podcasting is up to 403,000 Google citations. It ain't bucks in the bank, but plot the curve and it looks fabulously tippingpoinesque. There are thousands of podcasts available and at least two directories of available content: here and here.
Some of the content is pretty amateurish. (Think Wayne’s World--- not the movie, but the supposed cable access show in Aurora Illinois of the original Saturday Night Live sketch.) But a lot of podcasts are terrific and refreshing---- and the medium itself is only a few months old!
This is a different medium from radio. More personal. More “talking to me.” One of the largest podcasters is Doug Kay’s IT Conversations. Great, in-depth discussions with folks in the technology community (An awful lot of content of this nascent medium serves its geek constituency. But bloggers spent a lot of time talking about Open Source and the like before they got around to other stuff.)
Some of the most amazing content at IT Conversations is complete audio archives of important tech industry conferences: Web 2.0, PopTech, Bloggercon, Stanford’s Accelerating change and 20 others are there in their entirety, for free. Doug told me he estimates his programming is being listened to 7-10 times as much since the advent of posdcasting and the ability for shows to be to syndicated directly to listeners iPod's and similar MP3 devices.
Dave Winer points out in an IT Conversations interview that when working out, he used to have a choice of CNN or NPR. Now he can hear all sorts of folks in his tech community talking in depth on topics of interest, and that’s a rich alternative to general purpose radio. Adam Curry at Bloggercon says he’s been in radio for years, and this is just more human and less contrived than broadcasting. Doc Searls picks up the same theme, speaking of this as a NetNative medieum based on archiving and personalization, rather than radio which is about live to a large audience.
Podcasting can be a more in-depth medium. There are two sex shows listed in the podcast directory. I listened listening to a long phone-in discussion between a guy caller who’s having trouble getting anywhere on dates and the female host who’s doing an in-depth review of his dating habits while trying to get to the bottom of what he’s really looking for in a relationship. It’s more interesting that radio call-in advice shows. Not because it’s more risqué (although it is that too), but because the call isn’t confined to the “three minutes and onto the commercial” format of radio
Over the last few days I’ve begun using ipodder, PRX, and software that lets me record streams that aren’t yet podcast onto my ipod. I find I’m now surrounded by some of the best radio I’ve heard in years; its just ironic that I don’t need the radio to listen to any of it.
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