honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Corporate giants conquering the podcast world

By Anjali Athavaley
Washington Post

spacer
spacer

It started out as a hobby: Host your own laid-back audio show out of the basement, "Wayne's World"-style, then make it available to Internet users on their digital media players. All you needed was a cheap microphone, something to say and time to kill.

But last month, the grass-roots phenomenon of podcasting went mainstream. Apple Computer Inc. made the talk or music shows easier to find and download on its iTunes online music site. The site went from zero podcast subscriptions to more than a million in just two days.

Corporate media moved quickly to stake out podcasting as an avenue for reaching new listeners. While early podcasters offered talk-radio-style shows with quirky titles such as "The Frat Pack Tribute" and "The Rock and Roll Geek Show," big companies have elbowed in with condensed versions of popular broadcasts. Now it's "Queer Eye Hip Tips" and "ABC News" that are the most popular podcasts on iTunes, making the one-person, in-house shows harder to spot in a sea of media logos.

Indie podcasters say iTunes has brought them new listeners, but that the site heavily promotes big-name podcasts while leaving out their homegrown shows.

"We invented podcasting," said Todd Cochrane, who hosts his own podcast, "Geek News Central," out of his home in Honolulu. "The people who are coming in now are jumping over the fence and joining the party. It's funny how Apple is so focused on the commercial shows and how little they are emphasizing the grass-roots side of podcasting."

The move widens the range of listening content available on the Web site and allows Apple to further promote the iPod as the king of digital media players.

It makes sense for Apple to emphasize corporate media podcasts over just any amateur show because big names are more credible to listeners who are new to the phenomenon, said Alex Nesbitt, who runs Digital Podcast, an online directory of 2,100 podcasts.

"Getting people to try the media is the first step," he said.

Cochrane's technology talk show drew 7,000 to 8,000 listeners before it became available on iTunes. Now, about 10,000 people tune in twice a week, he said.

But Cochrane said he thinks that big-name podcasts from CNN and Walt Disney Co. take away from the reason people started doing it in the first place: to talk comfortably and informally to what is sometimes just a handful of loyal fans.

"I think what's so novel about it is that it's your neighbor creating this content," Cochrane said.

It's not clear that there is a mass audience for podcasting.

Broadcasters see podcasting as a way to reach new listeners. These days, people want the freedom to listen to audio files whenever they feel like it, rather than on the strict schedule of a traditional radio station, said Phil Redo, a vice president at New York public radio station WNYC:

"We have got to be in those spaces or we run the risk of becoming less relevant to them."

In January 2005, WNYC posted its first podcast on its Web site and added three more in March. Before they became available through iTunes, the shows generated about 86,000 downloads a week. Lately, that number has exceeded 125,000. "It catapults us into a mainstream environment that we otherwise wouldn't get," Redo said.

In the Internet age, there is room in the public eye for both corporate media shows and basement podcasts, just as there's an audience for both mainstream news and Web logs, or blogs, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project: "There will always be hits driving the media, but the new thing that has entered the culture is that the small niche markets have found their own place."

The addition of podcasts to the mainstream iTunes Web site was the equivalent of putting podcasting "on steroids," introducing it to the masses and enticing new listeners, he said.

Besides, many podcasters do it just for fun and don't seem to care if they have a widespread audience, he said.

"They have things to say," Rainie said. "If it turns out that their six friends and their mother listen to them, that's enough."