Some interesting, if somewhat unclear, new developments in radio to talk about. First off, there’s podshows.com which aims to deliver specially-made “radio” shows straight to your mp3 player. There are a host of DJs that you’ve heard of like Tony Blackburn and Paul Gambaccini amongst others, all of whom are supplying shows. You then just pay your money (ranging from 49p to £1.50 as far as I can see) and download.
There are a few issues that still have to be ironed out. The website admits that not all the shows can actually be downloaded at the moment for music licensing reasons. Instead they need to be streamed. That’s actually quite crucial isn’t it? Still we’ll wait for the rest of the “paperwork” to be cleared up.
Then there’s a somewhat confusing FAQ which actually suggests that the shows won’t necessarily work with Ipods. Now that is a problem (albeit the same kind of problem Napster and most of the other non-Itunes sites have to face). I assumed that this must be because they’re serving the files as in Windows Media format (the FAQ speaks are DRM issues). But a test download conducted here at work reveled one of the files, at least, to be an MP3. Maybe that’s because only 60% of any given music track is played in that show? That’s one of the compromises they’ve had to make according to this Mediaguardian article from yesterday.
I suppose my main question is whether anyone is willing to pay 99p for a breakfast show. And not just the one on offer at podshows.com, but any breakfast show currently broadcast in this country. Yes, you have the flexibility that not even the BBC Radio Player can offer, but how much is it worth? A fiver a week. Maybe someoone like Howard Stern could get away with it. And maybe a spoken word service offering book readings, plays and comedy, but I’m not sure that anyone else could. Paying for radio, an essentially disposable medium, is not something we’re used to. It’ll be an uphill battle.
The other development I mentioned is from this story (in Media Guardian again) about UBC. They’re developing a service that let listeners buy tracks they hear on the radio as they listen through their DAB sets. They’re talking about using a datastream alongside the broadcast to get a clean version of a track without DJ or whatever. But this will mean new radios with SD Cards to download tracks onto. Exactly how you then access those tracks isn’t clear from the article. I assume that you’ll have to unlock them somehow – perhaps via a website. Either that, or the radio will have to be hooked up to a PC somehow. It all seems a little complicated, but then I haven’t heard the details.
All of this is fine, but is there any advantage in buying music tracks this way? Shazam seems an easier method (although even that could be better).
Anything where there’s too much complication is just not really going to work as a business. And requiring people to go out and buy new hardware just so they can spend even more money in the future? Now if they gave away sets based on future revenues that might make sense. But that’s not a sensible marketing strategy. Don’t forget that there are still questions about how profitable Itunes is as a business, the argument being that it’s really there just to sell hardware.
Keep it simple, and then you might have something.