credit: Andrew Hetherington; digital manipulation by Michael Elins
Curry, former VJ turned iPodder founder, podcasts his hit Daily Source Code from -Studio A8- in the front seat of his car.
"People think I'm this poseur guy from MTV, but I don't care," says Adam Curry, the former VJ whose long blond locks once mesmerized teenyboppers across the globe. "I've always had this total dual life as a geek and a celebrity." He pauses for a moment and flashes the signature Curry smile. He's trimmed his mane and become an Internet entrepreneur, but he's still got that swoon-inducing grin.
Curry, 40, is the brains behind iPodder, a tiny application that he believes has the power to challenge commercial radio. iPodder is the bastard offspring of the blog and the Apple MP3 player. It combines the hyperactive talkiness of blogs and the hipness of iPods into something utterly new: the podcast. iPodder uses the blog syndication tool RSS to automatically download homebrew radio shows, podcasts, directly into a portable MP3 player.
Every new medium needs a celebrity, and Curry is happy to fill that role. After leaving MTV in 1994, he started an Internet marketing company that went public, starred in his own reality TV show, and learned to fly a helicopter. Now he's ready to reinvent broadcasting. "Let me take you to my new studio!" he says excitedly. "I call it Studio A8." He leads me to his "studio," which is actually the front seat of his silver Audi A8, parked outside the Starbucks where we've been talking.
Curry plugs his PowerBook into the cigarette lighter and loops two microphones over the shade visors: one for me and one for him. Audio runs through a sound processor with FireWire. In the distance are the lights of Guildford, the London suburb where Curry lives with his wife and daughter.
"Hey, everyboooody," Curry croons, mock-jockey style. He starts interviewing me about my interview with him earlier that day. "You didn't ask me any of the sex questions I expected," Curry says petulantly. (My syndicated column, "Techsploitation," often deals with the subject.) "How was sex with Michael Jackson?" I ask. His fanciful answer is interrupted every few minutes by the deluxe navigation system in his car, which is delivering regular traffic reports from the British Broadcasting Corporation. Over the next 36 hours, roughly 50,000 people download the show - and my Michael Jackson question is still in there, along with Curry's answer and several updates on the state of the freeways around Surrey.
Welcome to podcasting, the medium that promises a future where anyone can make radio, instead of just listen to it. The biggest podcast audiences now number in the mere tens of thousands. Yet real radio, the kind with bona fide mass audiences, is starting to use the technology to make its shows available for download.
Several US public radio stations, as well as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC, are experimenting with the medium. Even beer megacorp Heineken is getting in on the action. The brewer has started making podcasts of popular DJs available on its Web site as part of a promotional campaign. Given that podcasting didn't exist nine months ago, this adoption curve is impressive. Podcasting - unregulated, low-cost, on-demand radio - is heading for a tipping point.
Curry's show, The Daily Source Code, was the first ever podcast. It began last August as a proof of concept for iPodder. Its tagline: "Where developers and users party together."
Curry's original idea was to start that party by adding video clips to his blog. But he changed his mind after attending BloggeréCon in 2001. There blog guru and RSS author Dave Winer convinced Curry that what people really want is the ability to "take the Internet away with you and listen to it on headphones."
Since Curry launched his show, nearly 500,000 people have downloaded iPodder, and the number of available shows has gone from zero to more than 2,000. This past November, the BBC began podcasting a popular history show called In Our Time, and in December CBC podcast its tech show, /Nerd.
CBC producer Tod Maffin says downloads for the /Nerd podcast hover around 5,000, although "they're growing steadily by about 15 percent per week." (/Nerd reaches about 1 million listeners via the airwaves.) He adds that the podcasts "reach outside the CBC's typical audience to younger people," a much-desired demographic. And in the not-too-distant future, Maffin hopes, podcasting will become a two-way street: "We hope to get content from average people who will effectively become citizen producers."
Bob Garfield's WNYC show On the Media has been available as a podcast since mid-January. He says podcasting is the perfect fit for the show's distributor, NPR, because public radio doesn't own spectrum the way that, for example, Clear Channel does. If a corporation owns its own transmitter, then podcasting undercuts its core asset. But as Garfield points out, public radio is different. "Whatever we can do to expand our audience, we'll do," he says. "I feel confident that we're the leading media criticism show among the 11 people who are podcast enthusiasts." Actually, Garfield's numbers are close to Maffin's.
Still, Garfield also thinks it's just a matter of time until podcasting comes into its own: "It's likely that podcasting will bring hitherto obscure or nonexistent broadcasters to the fore, and some genius will be discovered," he says. "And that's a risk - when podcasters get popular, big broadcasting operations could get squeezed out of the market." For all its promise, podcasting is still in the early adopter stage, and the shows that you can download today are not enough to challenge big media - yet. But imagine being able to listen to "Science Friday," or last night's game whenever you want, wherever you are. That day is coming, and it's likely to bring a whole host of as-yet-undiscovered radio talent with it.
For a sampling of potential podcast geniuses, look no further than PodcastAlley.com, the burgeoning community's blog of record. It lists the 10 most popular podcasts every day. Curry's show is always among them - you might say it's at the center of the podosphere, a place where reputation and recommendations rule. When Curry puts a teaser for somebody else's podcast on The Daily Source Code, downloads double for the show he mentions.
The podcasting scene is reminiscent of the early, heady days of blogging, circa 2001, a time before Wonkette made the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Like bloggers in the good old days, podcasters are obsessively internecine and gloriously, honestly unprofessional.
Everybody in the podosphere seems to know everybody else, which is simultaneously cozy and deeply weird. On his show, Curry coos over a daily Bible podcast that features kids reading bits of the New Testament, while husband-and-wife podcast team Dawn and Drew speculate about whether Whole Wheat Radio is really recorded in a shack. Meanéwhile, Michael Geoghegan at Reel Reviews is thanking Curry for mentioning his podcast, and Engadget host Phillip Torrone is rebroadcasting an NPR segment by blogger and Wired correspondent Xeni Jardin. When was the last time you heard your favorite morning show team crack an in-joke that referred to what a movie reviewer said two days ago on another station?
Everything counts as content: from lovingly recorded sneezes to serious consumer reports. Shows are broadcast daily, weekly, and at random; some last for three minutes and others, three hours. "I have iPodder set to download random podcasts, and one day I got a 10-minute show of somebody just screaming," Torrone says. "It was great."
Podcasts mix nerdy awkwardness with gems you would never stumble across on the FM dial. On Insomnia Radio, host Jason Evangelho confesses, "I'm talking really quietly tonight because my family is sleeping upstairs." Then he proceeds to play one of the coolest songs you've never heard: "Signing Emo," a spot-on parody of the music industry by MC Lars. Over on Whole Wheat Radio, acoustic-folk nerds Jim Kloss and Esther Golton have taken to posting three-hour "house concerts" performed by touring bands who stop by the couple's place in the tiny Alaska town of Talkeetna.
Historian Jonathan Sterne, author of The Audible Past, compares podcasting to the early days of radio, when formats were random and amateurs ruled the airwaves. He points out that it took more than a decade of hobbyists goofing around with their transmitters before the first commercial broadcast went out in 1922.
People podcast for a lot of reasons - to expound on obscure topics, showcase their best friends' music or spoken word routines, and break into radio without buying an antenna tower. It's also a haven for hobbyists. Geoghegan, host of Reel Reviews, says he never would have had the time for Internet broadcasting if it hadn't been as easy as "clicking a button and talking."
Although podcasts don't conform to any formula, their hosts do share one passion: circumventing the restrictions imposed on traditional broadcasting by industry and government. Partly in political protest and partly out of legal necessity, podcast music tends to favor songs that aren't policed by the Recording Industry Association of America. Because listeners download each show, producers aren't eligible for the kinds of broadcast licenses available to radio stations and webcasters. They have to license each song the same way iTunes does. The upside is that they don't have to conform to the FCC's broadcast decency regulations: They're downloads. As a result, they contain large doses of what George Carlin once dubbed the "seven dirty words you can't say on television."
"Our comedy podcasts are absolutely indecent," says Whole Wheat's Kloss. He and cohost Golton publish regular 15-minute rants packed with expletive-laced invectives against everything from lazy friends to the world-eating stupidity of BoingBoing. "But saying fuck on the air isn't that big of a thrill," Kloss concedes. "The important thing is that you can be natural and not worry about what you're going to say."
Best-selling erotica writer Violet Blue launched a podcast in January that she describes as a combination of sexy stories and "concrete, explicit, step-by-step sex instruction from a trained sex educator." It's exactly the sort of thing the FCC would fine repeatedly if it were aired on the radio. That's why Blue believes podcasting is the perfect medium for people like her who want to distribute popular content that's illegal to broadcast. "Podcasts are private, anonymous, available, and archivable," she says. "And people don't have to sit by the radio to listen. They can save it for later, for car trips or sharing with a lover."
It's still too early to say what would make a hit podcast, but for enthusiasts the possibilities seem limitless. Like Blue, Curry is ready to experiment. He's excited by the ways his already-popular show could evolve in a medium unconstrained by place, time, and censorship. "I feel like I helped build the centralized entertainment complex of the previous millennium," says Curry. "I know the pitfalls of that way of doing things because I was in the middle of it. But now we're going the other way. Decentralizing. Building our own stars."
One podcast at a time.
Blogging meets radio meets iPod. Subscribe to all the prerecorded radio shows you like. Podcasting apps download them to your computer and sync them to a portable player. Want to be a pod star? You can record your own podcasts and share them online - it's almost as easy as blogging. - P.B.
HOW IT WORKS
1. The podcaster records a show as an audio file.
2. Then, he adds a hyperlink for the show to an RSS feed on a Web server.
3. The listener's podcast software checks RSS feeds at set intervals, downloading and adding new shows to a playlist.
4. When the listener docks his portable player, it updates with the latest shows.
HOW TO GET IT
To download podcasts to any portable (not just the iPod), start with the right software. Wired's pick:
iPodder: This free PC/Mac/Linux program lets you subscribe to podcasts from its directory listing or add your own. It periodically checks for and downloads new podcasts. If you use iTunes, you'll find the latest shows waiting whenever you dock your iPod. Free download, ipodder.org
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN PODCAST
1. Plug a USB headset with earphone and microphone into your computer.
2. Install the free Audacity MP3 recorder for Windows, Mac, or Linux. Make a recording, then save it as an MP3 file.
3. Upload the MP3 file to your Web site or blog. Follow the instructions at ipodder.org to create an RSS feed on your site.
WHAT'S NEXT
Ourmedia (ourmedia.org), a grassroots media project backed by the Internet Archive, will provide free podcasting tools and permanent hosting for podcasts beginning in mid-2005. Also, broadcasters such as the Canadian Broadcasting Company, BBC, and NPR are currently experimenting with podcasting.
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com), a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote about cell phone security in issue 12.12.Feature:
Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star
Plus:
Podcasting at a Glance
