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Radio Just Got a Lot More Portable

Posted on: Monday, 8 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

Aug. 7--If you can digest the following sentence, you're hereby certified to go forward into the 21st century of entertainment:

Podcasting can be to radio what blogging is to books.

What ...?

Don't panic ... but the entertainment technology learning curve is again steepening, with the advent of podcasting, the latest innovation in the ever-changing landscape of do-it-yourself media.

Podcasting allows people to be Internet radio DJs from the comfort of their own homes, indulging in either music, talk or a combination of both. For about a year now, people have been using recording software on their computers to record shows and post them on the Web.

For browsers, there's suddenly a whole new network of downloadable radio shows featuring rare, classic or underground music, talk on everything from gardening to religion to politics to wine, and opinions on everything and from every perspective -- all together in a way familiar to our ears.

"Two weeks ago I was in Idaho visiting my parents," says Pod Man, a 52-year-old Albany resident and avid podcaster named John (he won't give out his last name to preserve his anonymity). "My dad is into swing music, so we recorded some and I let him talk. He's a walking library of swing music. It was really cool."

Listeners can get shows from guys like Pod Man by going to a radio station or Web site and hear streaming audio of the show on their computer, or download it onto a portable jukebox, and listen later at their leisure.

The content providers range from grass-roots amateurs to the biggest of the big media companies.

ABC, for example, podcasts highlights from "Good Morning America" and its news shows. BBC and National Public Radio offer podcasts of their newscasts. Apple recently added a podcasting segment to its music site iTunes, and users responded by downloading more than 1 million podcasts the first two days, Apple reported.

Now that we're clear on that -- and this is how fast technology moves these days, so pay attention -- you don't even need the pod part anymore. You can hear podcasts on real radio -- that is, if you live in the Bay Area.

Infinity-owned San Francisco station KYOU 1550 AM has shifted formats, playing almost all podcasts culled from independent podcasters. Station manager Stephen Page admits it's all a big experiment, banking on the notion that do-it-yourself media will just keep getting bigger.

"This is the only radio station in the world broadcasting only podcasts," Page says. "It's a petri dish to understand what podcasting is all about.'

On KYOU, it can be someone dishing on politics and art, or someone sharing live recordings of Miles Davis playing the Fillmore in the '60s, or a combination of the two. It can be left wing, right wing, or no wing. You can do a show about sports, entertainment, gardening ... whatever.

Pod Man, a regular contributor to KYOU, says one of his favorite podcasts involved someone explaining time travel.

That a corporation like Infinity is turning an entire station (albeit a small one) over to a new, unproven media method shows a new attitude among major media outlets. They remember all too well how record companies in the late '90s, for example, refused to acknowledge the Internet as a major delivery system of music, and are still suffering today as a result.

"All good companies take creative risks," says David Goodman, Infinity's president of marketing, who pushed the idea of an all-podcasting station at the corporate level. "History clearly teaches us that you have to embrace innovation and change."

Deregulation of media in the mid-'90s allowed major conglomerates to gobble up smaller radio stations. The inevitable cost-cutting saw some stations using prerecorded or syndicated shows in areas formerly focused locally.

"It used to be you'd listen to a San Francisco station and know it was a San Francisco station, not some guy in Florida," Page says. "Lots of disc jockeys used to start in small markets and work their way up to the big places. They could learn the trade. So Infinity is kind of looking at (KYOU) as a farm club."

KYOU is a good place to start. The station was foundering, not even showing up on the last three periods of local radio Arbitron ratings. There's only a handful of employees, so Infinity doesn't have to worry about big overhead. Though located in a big market, high-tech San Francisco, the signal isn't too strong -- but strong enough to reach throughout the city and into Marin, the East Bay, Berkeley and Oakland, and down the Peninsula, all places with no shortage of open-minded, intellectual people open to new media.

"We wanted to do it in San Francisco because, clearly, San Francisco is the epicenter of free speech in this country," Goodman says.

Like bloggers, who offer their thoughts in online journals, podcasters take advantage of the Internet to get viewpoints out for public consumption. "Instead of us pushing our content to you, we want to make it easier for you to distill your content," Goodman says. "We flipped the paradigm. Podcasting and bloggers are the 21st century version of the soapbox. Your voice can be heard instantaneously around the world, and that's cool."

It's not exactly that easy, at least not at KYOU. On the air with the new format for a couple of months, Page spends much of his long days going through either submitted content, or stuff he finds on the Internet. "Some is good," he says. "Most is quite bad." When Page likes something, he sends it to the Infinity lawyers, who comb the broadcasts for libel and indecency.

Podcasters on KYOU don't get paid for the content, which typically ranges from a couple of minutes to nearly an hour. Page says there was some grumbling among the podcasting community when a corporation got involved. Much of it stopped, however, when Page told them they could sell advertising on their own shows.

"They can read ads like public broadcasting does," Page says. "It's very organic. It's not like they're doing a Miller beer commercial. When I told them they could do this, the level of hostility diminished."

In the genre's relatively short life (about a year), Page says there've already been three waves of podcasters. The first wave was techies eager to see what they could do. Then came the former DJs and others disgruntled over the limitations of mainstream radio. Now, a year into the phenomenon, here come the "Mom and Pop" DJs, doing just about everything under the sun.

"I was just in Fresno last weekend visiting a friend," says Pod Man. "He's a jazz lover, so we did a jazz show. I plan on getting out there and talking to more people."

Broadcasting commercial music on Internet podcasts gets dicey: As with so many other innovations the past decade, legalities can't keep up with the technology. KYOU, however, pays the publishing fees for songs just like any other radio station.

You can bet that lawyers are huddling right now. A number of companies are supposedly pondering how to integrate new, easy-to-manage technology to get into the podcasting business.

Look for more companies coming in on the other end, producing packages for potential podcasters to get started. San Francisco's Odeo, an all-purpose one-stop podcasting company and Web site, is about to launch, providing future podcasters everything they need but the computer and a microphone (and that might already be built into your computer). No computer? No problem. Leave Odeo a voice-mail message and they can turn it into a podcast for you.

"There's going to be an explosion of user-generated content," says Goodman. "KYOU is just the first step in the journey."

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Copyright (c) 2005, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.

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Source: Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)

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