Podcasts and music: law and licensing issues

Form time to time I like to sprinkle in a bit of the law here on the blog (which is only a slight hat tip to my other life as an honest-to-goodness lawyer). I only do it when we need to, and only when I stumble upon good stuff like this great resource... last summer's Podcast & new Media Expo panel on music licensing. One of the panelists is Colette Vogele, an expert on IP law in this area (and author of the Podcasting Legal Guide... an indispensable resource).

It covers the four different types of licenses and a primer on copyright law. Check it out here.

Feedburner ain't infallible

I just spent the morning cursing Feedburner.

While working on a client's premium podcast, the service that has always been a really nice way of creating a welcome interface for users (play now buttons, choice of subscribe options, etc.) totally rebuffed any attempt to make episode #1 be recognized in an mp3 enclosure. That's fancy talk for "it didn't work, and iTunes wouldn't see a podcast." I still can't figure out if it was a Blogger problem or not, but it was officially not working... despite all the elements being there.

So, it was back to the olden days of podcasting... yep all the way back to 2004. I had to code my own source RSS feed and plug that into Feedburner. Lo and behold it worked. I wonder what people who weren't mucking with hand rolled RSS feeds do when presented with this issue? I suspect they throw their hands in the air and give up... that's a shame, and it shows how we have a ways to go in the industry to truly make it simple when a Blogger-Feedburner handshake won't work on the first, second or even third try...

BTW, if you're in the same boat I was this morning, check out the podcast feed generator. It'll get your feed parsed out for episode one. Beyond that you have to write your own code in addition to what it spits out. Still, a handy resource in a pinch.

Olympic podcasts? Don't look for an athlete-produced one.

The International Olympic Committee has just made NBC and other rights holders (who give them lots and lots of money) very happy. Athletes are banned from podcasting from the Olympics according to Podcasting News. Their take on the IOC guidelines:

[A]udio podcasting, video podcasting, photoblogging and vlogging are banned for Olympic athletes, media representatives, officials and staff. Anyone violating the guidelines may be banned from the Olympics and sued for damages.

Too bad. Wouldn't it have been cool to get an insider look at some of the track athletes' prep? Swimmers' parties after the final lap's been swum? This all goes back to my original theory that the Olympics have gone downhill since Lake Placid 1980... but then again, I didn't exactly get an Eric Heiden podcast or a US Hockey video podcast then either...

Podcasting predictions

The head of Wizzard Media projects significant growth, matching the marketing report from a few days ago:

Well, I’d like to predict that the rest of industry getting better at reporting.

I’d have to guess that, oh, if i had a crystal ball to forecast Wizzard’s statistics, my educated guess is 1.5 - 1.8 billion downloads, and double to four times the ad spending of the past year.

More listeners... more revenue. This medium is growing, despite the doom and gloom predictions (sort of) back at the New Media Expo. Now, do I think tech podcasts are growing? No... those were the realm of the early adopters, and I think (maybe... perhaps) that they've maxed out on listeners. Not as good for Leo Laporte, but plenty good for the yoga podcasts, the political podcasts, and everthing else in between.

Podcast advertising and ratings standards

The Association of Downloadable Media announced that it will be presenting "Advertising and Sponsorship Standards and Guidelines for Traffic Measurement" at the ad:tech Expo in San Francisco, April 15-17. Should be interesting.

Speaking of ratings and other metrics, a recent article suggested that most podcasts are consumed on computer desktops rather than portable media players like iPods. That's good news if you are a podcaster that spends additional time putting together shownotes and other additions on their webpage...

Audacity recovery utility

For you Mac users* of Audacity you may have had a crash and lost your recording. It happens... trust me. I just had a massive crash and turned to my friend, the Audacity Recovery Utility, and it made a very bad problem turn into a blip on the radar... a small bump in the road...

You see, Audacity is always saving your audio in about 10 second chunks. The problem is that in a lengthy recording, you have hundreds of these chunks. You could string them together one by one, but that would take forever and probably not work anyways. Download the program (there'sa version for older PowerPC Macs as well as Intel ones) and make it your friend. The trick is finding the hidden temp files... go into your Audacity preferences tab to find them - it's usually in a hidden folder you can't find without going into the finder (Go>Go to Folder). Once you have them, plug that path into the recovery utility and let it roll. It will string these files together into a WAV file in the same place as those temp files.

After that, breathe a sigh of relief.

*PC people, check out a similar option here.