The Business of Podcasting Takes Off

I was just hanging out with a friend who's interested in podcasting. I remember trying to encourage him to get into blogging about a year ago and the discussion involved a lot of me explaining how things might work. Talking to him today about podcasting didn't involve explaining anything since he basically saw it as having his own radio show. In fact, he also introduced me to the existence of Podcasting Hacks which came out in August. Suddenly the student became the teacher!

In a similar way, the idea of podcasting as a possible business has taken off much more quickly than did blogging. Although I do think that the legitimizing effects of blogging as a form of self publishing helped set the stage for the development of pro-podcasting, it should have been more obvious to me that podcasting would be able to leverage the business model for radio without having to take advertisers through blogging's learning curve, even though the basic model for all this stuff is advertising with the added possibility of subscriptions for podcasters.

A recent article by Michael Bazeley entitled Podcasts Starting to Lure Advertisers makes the ability of podcasting to leverage radio business models explicit with Ron Bloom's comments:
"I think things will take a dramatic turn . . . There's a $32 billion war chest invested in radio advertising. Advertisers are already leaning forward and looking at alternatives."

Bloom is CEO of PodShow, a San Francisco based podcast network that, according to Bazeley, "already has advertising deals with companies such as Absolut Vodka, Logitech, EarthLink and America Online."

Bazeley also points to the success of Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus's Dawn and Drew Show that allowed Drew to quit his day job and Paige Heniger and Gretchen Vogelzang's Mommycast that recently announced a "12-month sponsorship agreement with Dixie paper products, worth more than $100,000."

An infrastructure is emerging that will further strengthen the ability for podcasters to profit from advertising including such developments as Audible's podcast metrics tool and RadioTail's podcast ad network. However, for music bloggers, the issue of playing copyrighted music presents some problems, just as it would for any indie radio station, on or offline.

One solution is the notion of podsafe music and the development of platforms for connecting artists, podcasters and advertisers such as the podsafe music network (from PodShow) and PodcastSPOTS. What's cool about such efforts is that they also offer additional possibilities for up and coming musicians to get their music heard.

The UK's Association of Independent Music is developing licensing for podcasters and one of the panels on Friday at last month's Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference, which you can listen to as an MP3, was titled Music in Podcasts: The Future of Music Licensing (scroll down to topic 2c).

Actually, the MP3s of panel presentations on Saturday are also worth checking out and both days cover a lot of issues related to podcasting as a business. I totally missed out on news of this conference because I haven't been keeping up with PaidContent.org, which now has a Podcasting category, nor with Podcasting News, which should be a daily read for folks interested in podcasting for fun or profit.

To be perfectly frank, there's a lot more I could have discussed because the business of podcasting's really taking off. Hopefully the following articles about podcasting as a biz plus some related interviews will help fill in the gaps:
Online Journalism Review - Will NPR's podcasts birth a new business model for public radio?
Spinfluencer - Podcast: On the Record....Online with Podshow.com CEO and co-founder Ron Bloom
Wired News - Profits May Rock Podcasting World
Business Week - Indie Podcasting: Not So Independent Anymore
SF Bay Guardian - Pod people: SF's podcasters build on assorted quirks, intrepid ideas, and a will to get naked
And Inside Digital Media - Multiple interviews of interest but the current setup makes direct links impractical.

Comments

[GNX Music]

YEah man. Podcasting is really turning into something big. Lets justhope that the quality of content does not suffer.

Peace. Keep doing yourthing.

GNX Music

[julien]

nice post. in regards to licensing issues with music podcasts, it's obvious that getting permissions is basically the only way to go if you're interested in starting up this kind of thing.

one of the advantages of my podcast being related to hip hop is the fact that every single emcee in the industry does "featuring" tracks with small time records/record labels every little while, so i can get even some of the hugest names in hip hop on my show if i make sure i get a track like that (such as getting Ghostface or Talib Kweli on the recent DangerDoom album).

anyway, i'll keep in touch. peace and keep up the good work!