“Damn, there must be a business model around here somewhere.”
I’m sure that’s what’s being said in bedrooms, offices and wine bars around the country. “There are just too many of these iPod things around and all these podcast guys are producing really cheap/free content, for there not to be a money-making opportunity”, they might continue.
The obvious one, of course, is to charge for audio content downloads. iTunes is famously scraping a profit out of it. Apple’s advantage, though, lies in shifting enormous volumes (half a billion tracks sold so far) and their content has already proven its market worth over a century of recorded music sales. Making money out of podcasts and other non-music content is a whole nother matter.
While PodShows continues to recycle yesterday’s radio and tv stars, two former Capital Radio types are focusing on selling spoken word content, at their audioVille site.
Nice idea, particularly as the word “podcast” doesn’t seem to appear on the site. It’s far from perfect: apart from one or two gems, their catalogue is a touch patchy. In addition, various things on the site are broken, everything is a secure page and their designer seems to have had a personality transplant part way through creating the home page. Perhaps worst of all, though, there’s little, if no, focus. Olly Rowe, one of the founders, was quoted by the Guardian as saying they’ve “deliberately given it a younger feel” than Radio 4.
Hmm, younger feel, hey? That seems to have translated into co-opting some of commercial radio’s tackier and more regrettable contributions to humanity. They appear to have created a comedy character called “Dave”, whose woes you can read about in a - presumably - fictional diary. Apparently, this guy was going to be their business partner but, after being jilted at the altar, he had a nervous breakdown. Wow, great subject for comedy, guys. What relevance that has to their material, I don’t know. Maybe it works for the type of people who listen to local commercial radio but I can’t see that sort of naffness working with the early adopters who will, inevitably, be their customerbase.
The other problem, as I see it, lies with pricing. Briefly: you can end up paying 79p for two minutes of audio. The might be okay for the latest hot sounds from the hit parade, but when it’s perhaps just one Eddie Izzard joke, it doesn’t feel like value for money.
It’s not all bad, though. There’s no DRM, they do have some good content and they seem to be producing original material for it. Maybe their idea of charging bedroom-audio producers to host their content on the site isn’t that great, but if they do become the destination for spoken word content downloads in the UK, it might not be a bad way for some podcasters to get a bit more exposure.
I hope audioVille succeeds, mainly because their content shows promise. However, I also hope they stop trying to shoehorn the techniques of commercial radio promotion into a shape for the web.
