Thanks to commenter Richard Miller for drawing my attention to the notices on Danny Baker’s All Day Breakfast Show and Baker & Kelly websites.
Danny has posted a note to say that there will be no more podcasts following an “irreversible and utter breakdown between the on-air team and the company who have, with varying degrees of success, provided it to you online.”
Like undoubtedly many others, Richard wants to know about getting a refund on his £50 annual subscription that he was encouraged to take out.
I must admit that following the first break in transmission, I never continued to subscribe and had only paid by the week. It now seems that not one penny of that cash has found its way to any of the “on-air” team or the producers of the shows.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a radio industry event held by the Radio Academy called Radio at the Edge which was all about the exciting new frontiers, opportunities and realities that radio (and audio) broadcasters are now facing. Should radio go DAB? Is the future in some kind of internet distribution? How should radio address social networks.
Paul Myers from Wippit was on one of the panels, explaining that he thought that the future was podcasting with its ability to go anywhere. Of course, if presenters don’t get paid or least shows don’t find sponsors, then as a professional model, that doesn’t work.
So here ends another experiment in subscription “radio.”
Is there another subscription radio service? There are certainly paid for audio books from the likes of Audible, eMusic and Silk Sound Books amongst others, but they’re not the same thing.
London radio station LBC offers LBC Plus – a premium podcasting proposition which offers full length programmes for between £3 and £4 a month depending on subscription length. And we still have those Ricky Gervais podcasts sold via Audible (and now for sale as audio CDs too).
I still believe that a paid for podcasting model can work – but what this episode has made very clear is that you need to be very certain about the technical backend that you have in place. I doubt that I was the only person who neglected to come back after the initial breakdown in production (however much or little that may have also been due to some personal circumstances in DB’s life).
I guess for Baker, it’s back to his show on BBC London. The question now is whether or not he’ll have a BBC podcast made available. Vanessa Feltz has one for goodness’ sake.
As for the Baker and Kelly show – I think someone somewhere is missing a trick with this. The Times sponsored a World Cup series of podcasts last year, and I think that sponsorship is the way to go with this show. I actually mentioned it to a friend who procures sponsorship deals commercially as something that they might like to look at for one of their clients. If I was working at an independent radio production house, I think I’d be trying to put a project together to make a 50 minute weekly show that comes with a sponsor and that’s available as a podcast and also available to independent radio stations.
But what do I know…?