issues and studies

This page looks at podcasting, the audio spin-off of RSS and blogging.

It covers -

• issues - censorship, copyright, defamation
• politics?
• economics and podvertising
• demographics - who's uploading and listening
• primers - technical, commercial and legal guides for the podcast perplexed

Blogging is discussed in a separate, more detailed profile elsewhere on this site.

    issues

Podcasting faces the same issues encountered by multimedia bloggers, including -

• defamation and hatespeech
• censorship
• intellectual property
• commerce

Defamation and hatespeech

As noted in the detailed discussion of defamation elsewhere on this site, the internet is not a law-free zone. As yet there is no case law regarding defamatory statements by wannabee shockjocks or other podcasters. However, it is inevitable that someone will take offence at words spoken in a podcast and seek legal redress - whether within the podcaster's jurisdiction or otherwise - against the author and third parties such as an ISP or ICH.

There is similarly likely to be action against hatespeech, although as with personal defamation action for racial or other vilification faces challenges regarding litigation that crosses national borders.

Censorship

That is an issue for the censorship of podcasts for breaches of national or local regimes regarding sexual, political or other content.

Jason Evangelho of Insomnia Radio is quoted as claiming

The whole beauty of it is that I don't have to censor myself. And I can say 'um.'

In practice much podcasting seems replete with 'um', 'ah' and non-meaningful silences. It is likely that salting the noise with calls to overthrow the 'butchers of beijing' or denunciations of religious dogma will attract the same responses encountered elsewhere on the net, including prosecution of podcasters and third parties such as hosts, takedown notices and blacklisting of particular addresses.

Intellectual Property

Much podcasting involves dissemination of an existing recording and thus intersects with the intellectual property rights of lyricists or poets, performers, publishers and the entity responsible for the production of that recording.

There has been little attention to the legality of podcasting or rights mechanisms (eg remuneration of copyright owners via a collecting society), with governments, industry bodies and others instead focussing on more traditional filesharing.

The Recording Industry Association of America has unsurprisingly commented that

Podcasters, like the users of any other sound recordings, must obtain the appropriate licenses from the copyright owners, or their designees

although it is likely that few podcasters see the need for such licencing.

In the US some of the more prominent podcasters do appear to be paying annual licensing fees, of up to around US$500 for intensive casting. Others are featuring performers who own the rights to their music, either recordings that have been licenced under a mechanism such as Creative Commons or that are licenced to the particular podcaster after contact with the performers.

Publication through use of the MP3 format in principle requires licensing from that format's developer. In practice Thomson has relinquished licensing fees unless the user makes over US$100,000 per year from the podcasts.

    politics?

The Politics of Podcasting by Jonathan Sterne, Jeremy Morris, Michael Baker & Ariana Freire commented in 2008 that

The popularisation of podcasting as a practice ought to turn our attention back out to questions regarding who has the right to communicate, to what extent and by what means. The iPod/RSS story of podcasting, so pervasive in press accounts, connects nicely with the technoutopian currents of the business world, but offers little insight into the potential cultural significance of the practice. Indeed, the term podcasting itself seems more a product of the citational practices of bloggers — and mainstream news outlets' tendencies to take their terms and debates as preconstructed ... — than any meaningful reflection on the nature or significance of the practice. If podcasting is like blogging, it is not only because it uses RSS technology or allows for the possibility of an amateur aesthetic, but because it opens up cultural production to a whole group of people who might otherwise have great difficulty being heard. This audio culture is fuelled by a producer culture that has developed around the emergence of (relatively) cheap audio production hardware and software, and it encompasses both professionals and amateurs alike.

Greater access is the rallying cry of podcasting, but the point of our historical detour is to suggest that if the problem is the corporate control of broadcasting, then we should be talking about a new vision of broadcasting as a whole. If we free the term broadcasting from its corporate connotations and remember its longer history, then podcasting is not simply an outgrowth of blogger culture, but rather part of a much longer history of dissemination. Podcasting is not an alternative to broadcasting, but a realisation of broadcasting that ought to exist alongside and compete with other models. If broadcasting were a more generally available term, then perhaps we could begin to speak of our own broadcasts without sounding grandiose or pretentious. The point is not endless celebrations of individuality in computer culture. It is not enough to add 'My Broadcasts' to 'My Documents', 'My Music' and 'My Photos.' Rather, we would like to see broadcasting reopened as a political and cultural question. In some small way, and in spite of its preposterously branded name, podcasting might contribute to that project. At its best, it has certainly already contributed to the weird diversity of audio out there in the world.

    economics

In 2005 we forecast the proliferation of claims that it is possible to make a living from podcasting, echoing rhetoric about "blogging for dollars" that has featured arguments that blogging can be a career rather than a vocation (whether funded through contributions by readers, subscriptions, payola for featuring a music track or inclusion of advertising or even discreet advertorial in a sort of 'paid placement').

As of early 2007 the jury was still out, despite hype about podvertising and projections that aggregate US spending on podcast sponmsorship and ads in podcasts will rise from US$3.1m in 2005 to US$80m in 2006, US$240m in 2008 and US$400m in 2011. It is unclear whether pleas for sponsorship or contributions are falling on deaf ears (and resulting in de-selection from RSS profiles) and whether inclusion of explicit advertising (modelled on commercial radio) will alienate listeners.

The Australia-based Podcast Network was promoted as 'evolution rather than revolution' -

Podcasting is a viable commercial medium because it has the same characteristics of more traditional mediums such as radio but with the added benefits of time-shifting, portability, user control, and global coverage.

It remains to be seen whether that is enough to sustain treats such as The Microsoft Developer Show and On The Pod with Senator Andrew Bartlett.

Maffin, in arguing that "podcasting will save radio", asserted that

The Podcasters are few today, but as the tools mature, expect plenty more to jump on the bandwagon. By podcasting, sometimes in public venues, some are already developing broadcasting skills the radio veterans have spent years learning: quick reaction to live events, multitasking technologies while speaking, the art of the cold-read, and voice performance. Podcasting also removes the barriers to getting on the air – as long as you can build enough of a brand to get people to your site, you are "on the air." There's no station producer or news director to convince. Already, netizens like Adam Curry have developed a brand with their podcast, and that brand can easily be turned into revenue. …

Radio executives can afford to write off podcasters now because there just aren't enough listeners to make it a worthwhile. But when 20,000 "high-value demographic" listeners regularly tune into a show, that show will attract advertisers. And advertisers will attract radio stations. It's a trend I call "program backdooring" – where the show will develop enough of an audience to make a "real" radio station take notice. ... Further, it's entirely possible that radio stations can sell individual shows on-demand: If you like such-and-such show so much, maybe you'll pay $1 to listen.

Sheri Crofts, Jon Dilley, Mark Fox, Andrew Retsema & Bob Williams in the 2005 Podcasting: A new technology in search of viable business models paper, which cites this note, took a more nuanced and cautious approach.

Regular podcast users are rare: podcasting remains a niche marketing channel.

One perspective is provided by audiobooks, ie readings on CD or cassette, particularly for listening in cars. The Audiobook Publishing Association announced in 2006 that aggregate audiobook sales in the UK were £71.4 million (£50 million from adult titles and £21.4 million from children's). The number of cassettes and disks sold was down 12.5% to 4.9m units (3.2 million adult, 1.7 million children's). Audiobooks for adults comprised £30.5 million for abridged titles, £19.5 million for unabridged. 2006 saw unit sales of CD audiobooks outstrip cassettes for the first time.

    demographics

Demographics about who is making podcasts and who is listening to them remain contentious.

In May 2007 ComScore claimed that "over-35s" account for over 50% of US consumers who download podcasts from Apple's iTunes service. 35- to 54-year-olds accounted for half of all the iTunes podcasts downloaded. Overall 63% of podcasts downloaded were by men. 18- to 24-year-olds represented 29% of the total iTunes podcast download audience, followed by 35- to 44-year-olds (at 27%) and the 24- to 34-year-old cohort (14%).

Some studies in the UK have suggested that under 50% of people who download podcasts actually listen to them.

    primers

Primers about podcasting have the same evangelical flavour as most guides on 'how to be a blogger', with references to pirates (good) and dead but not yet buried 'big media' (bad) and 'community'.

They include Todd Cochrane's Podcasting: Do-It-Yourself Pirate Radio for the Masses (New York: Wiley 2005), Bart Farkas' Secrets of Podcasting: Audio Blogging for the Masses (Berkeley: Peachpit 2005) and Podcast Solutions: The Complete Guide to Podcasting (Berkeley: Friends of ED 2005) by Michael Geoghegan & Dan Klass. The latter asks

Are you the kind of person who's got a lot to say? Have you ever wanted to share your talents, thoughts, and opinions with others, but have lacked the broadcasting knowledge and contacts to achieve such a goal? Well, today it's well within your grasp, thanks to Podcasting - using only some simple recording equipment, a computer, and the Internet, you can record and distribute your own audio shows, including anything you want - comedy, debate, news, reviews, interviews, music - the only limit is your imagination.

Jake Ludington, asking whether podcasting was postmodern [!] commented

Podcasting can be a wonderful underground voice of the people, a digital Radio Free Geek, if you will, or it can be a mindless babble of sonic assault by people with nothing to say and much time to say it in, the gamut ranging through those whom "the best lack all convictions, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." We do love our spectacle, but wading through the endless morass of Podcasts from anyone with a microphone and a broadband line can be a daunting task; always hoping the next segment will be the revelatory decree, the one that makes a difference in your life, the transmission for which digital communication was invented, the one that transcends the medium and becomes the Next Big Thing. I just hope that Godot comes soon ...

Mark Fox & Tony Ciro offer a cogent wrapup of legal questions in the US and elsewhere in their 2005 paper The Emerging Legal Environment for Podcasting (PDF).

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