Podcasts, the audio offspring of Tivo and blog, are growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. Today more than 6 million American adults have downloaded a podcast from the web and it is estimated that by 2010, over 12 million US households will be listening to these free, intimate audio periodicals. The influx in podcast downloading is not surprising. Podcasting is no longer just an outlet for the closet Casey Kasem: major media outlets including National Public Radio, The New York Times, and The Onion have entered the mix and are making daily content available for download. With this boom in quality programming and the ever-growing number of podcast subscribers, podcasting is garnering attention from all the usual emerging-market party crashers.

A host of new web-based companies have cropped up all vying to most effectively organize, review, and create community for podcast enthusiasts. As online companies such as eBay have shown, it is often the site that sets up shop early, and innovates based on user-feedback that is capable of attracting and retaining users.

ITunes, Apple's audio interface program, currently leads the market. For the 22 million American iPod owners, iTunes has become an integral part of daily life. Its interface is thus both familiar and fairly user-friendly; iTunes has created an easy way to search for podcasts, subscribe, and upload podcasts through the program. Not one to leave consumers behind the trends, Apple has provided a special feature that posts the most frequently downloaded podcasts, allowing users to keep stride with popular tastes in various podcast categories. However, the program only allows downloaders to search by keywords which makes it difficult perhaps to find new music or more obscure and unfamiliar genres or artists.

Other podcast sites offer downloaders different features. Yahoo's Podcasts goes a few steps further by offering staff recommendations, ranking podcasts by user rating and by download frequency, and also organizes them by category. Yet independent player Odeo.com perhaps takes best advantage of the democratizing potential of podcasts, enabling visitors to record and share their own podcasts.

It remains to be seen which organizing principle will prove to be most effective in aiding users in locating podcasts. Despite the variety in function and capital-investment , none of the available directories is entirely comprehensive. The industry still lacks a directory that is searchable by multiple fields, interactive, and with online community building features such as open-source functions and message boards.

With entrepreneurs come advertisers or in this case pod-vertisers. Advertisements on the popular directory sites such as Podcast Alley have already popped up; however, paid audio advertisements have not made their way into even the most popular independently produced podcasts. The chief concern, according to Shawn Gold, publisher of Weblogs, is one of measurability: "We can track podcasts by the number of server-side downloads... It's very measurable when it comes to how many people download the podcast but we can't tell how many people listen to it -- or how many times they listen to it. " In other words, users may download a podcast but never transfer it to their MP3 player; or if they do, they may never end up listening to it. So for a podcast with a high downloading rate, over 100,000 each week for example, it is uncertain that even 50,000 of the downloaders ever listen to the program. Compared to a magazine with modest circulation of 4 million, podcast downloading is far from pervasive.

Lacking the potential to reach millions with each podcast advertisement, what draws companies to advertise? What is the allure?

Perhaps it's the target audience: podcast listeners are technology savvy trendsetters. While millions of MP3 players are sold each year, podcast listeners are still a relatively small group. Right now, the people listening to podcasts are primarily iPod owners, who tend to be in the coveted 18-34 year old demographic, and extremely racially and economically diverse. Advertisers see these individuals as key cultural barometers, forecasting what will be hip and hot, as they judge music and influence their peers.

With the freedom the podcast format offers taken with the attention podcasts are beginning to attract from advertisers, it is not surprising that the next party crashers in the queue are entertainment lawyers. Traditional music licensing organization such as BMI have begun to roll-out licensing programs for copyrighted material and RIAA the performance rights organization that monitors websites for copyrighted music, may soon do the same for podcasts.

Despite regulatory encroachments, podcasts should remain a strong source of new and exciting music. New services such as Podsafe Music Network, and Crossfader have popped up to connect independent musicians to podcasters and ensure that there is no shortage of new, legal music available for podcasters to broadcast.

There are certainly reasons to be skeptical of the viability of the podcast medium to serve as a true alternative to broadcast radio: the market is still nascent; technology to measure listernship is still unavailable; and the reach of podcasts remain lower than most small-town newspapers. However, if the vibrancy and diversity of the content of podcasts is any indicator its competitive force, podcasts will be breathing life into the radio market for a long time to come.

« Previous Next »