Meltdown Podcast Full of Catchy Rock Tunes

For a guy only in his early twenties, Phil Coyne has a lot of experience in music and podcasting. The Meltdown Podcast is his latest effort, and features catchy rock songs from variety of artists, often British (as is Coyne) but also from the U.S. and elsewhere.

I first heard of Coyne through Bitjobs for the Masses, his previous podcast, which concentrated on indie rock, often with a punk element. In the summer of 2007 Coyne changed the name of the show to The Meltdown, and broadened its focus to indie music of all styles. Blog entries state that he originally intended to have three regular Meltdown podcasts per week, each focusing on different types of music: one of his blog posts says he intended to have it feature "punk, funk, ska, blues, pop, metal, dance and everything in between." But it sounds like that plan has been derailed by a number of illnesses in Coyne's family and just the one Meltdown show has been available, with a hiatus in between episodes.

Coyne has been podcasting for more than two years and has also been involved in music booking and computer geekery. Here's hoping that he'll be able to achieve his vision for the Meltdown podcast(s).

CD Sales Down... How Accurate are Those Numbers?

We've all heard the statistics over over the last few about CD sales plummeting, largely due to music downloading (mostly illegal ones). Everyone seems to assume those stats are accurate and that the sale of recorded music is a business permanently in decline.

But I heard an podcast recently that made me question these stats and some of the assumptions behind them. Namely, who conducted the research, what channels of CD sales did they measure (and which did they not cover), and how much of recorded music sales do they actually cover?

The LiveWire podcast from Portland, Oregon featured an interview with Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, the successful online seller of indie artist CDs. I first heard of CD Baby about eight years ago when I noticed that a number of my favorite folk/Americana artists were selling their albums there.

Sivers said that contrary to the doom and gloom figures about declining CD sales, sales of independent music CD were actually up 60% or so over the last few years, I believe. So are the doom-and-gloom figures reported over the last few years only measuring CDs from major labels and not indie outfits? Do they cover only major bricks-and-mortar outlets and big online sellers like Wal-Mart and Amazon.com?

The discrepancy between the much-quoted stats and Sivers's figures make me wonder. After all, music sales charts rely on SoundScan, which is known to count sales from certain outlets and is accepted to exclude other channels.

Tartanpodcast Closes Up Shop

When I first got into listening to podcasts a few years back, Mark Hunter's Tartanpodcast was one of the first that I heard and subscribed to. Hunter's mission was to play what he considered the best in independant music written, played, and produced in Scotland. Sadly (for listeners, anyway) Hunter has decided to end the show.

The Tartanpodcast was clearly a labor of love, and Hunter managed to produce it weekly (as well as a more international podcast, the Mellow Monday Show) pretty much every week. Obviously, it was a lot of work to do the shows, in addition to holding down a full-time job and being a family man. Hunter is continuing to produce the Mellow Monday Show, with a different host.

Here's the comment I posted on Mark Hunter's blog after hearing that the Tartanpodcast had come to an end.

"Mark, I’ve enjoyed the podcast immensely almost since the beginning, so I’m sorry to see it end. But I can understand your reasons. A podcast is very demanding to create and produce. And even in a place as musically rich as Scotland, there’s only so much good-quality music to enable a weekly show to be produced, without repeating the same songs and artists over and over.
I hope you’ll consider doing an occasional Tartanpodcast once in a while, when the mood moves you and when you find you’ve accumulated enough new music that you find you’re excited about. Glad to hear Mellow Monday is continuing.
Thanks for all the great music!"

You can still listen to and download Tartanpodcast episodes here.

Podcasters Seek System for Using Ads

Nobody likes to hear ads on podcasts, but let's face it, ads can give podcasters the income they need to get a return on the time and money they spend on podcasting.

An article in today's New York Times examined some initiatives to help standardize and track ads on podcasts, so advertisers can get a better idea of how much exposure their ads are getting. This in turn will give advertisers more of a reason to place ads on podcasts, and thus bring more income to podcasters, so they can keep doing podcasting. (It's always sad to see a good podcaster stop because he or she couldn't keep spending the time and money to produce their program while holding down a regular job.)

Several developments are in the offing, including improvements in delivering and tracking ads, and the formation of a new industry group, the Association for Downloadable Media, which seeks to "help executives improve methods for creating, distributing, and tracking advertisements in podcasts." About 15 organizations are said to be in the new group, including Apple Inc. and National Public Radio (NPR), which produces dozens of podcasts based on its programming.

Podcasting, and advertising, has a lot of room to grow, as the article points out: only a little more than 10% of all Internet users have listened to a podcast, and the amoutn of money spent on advertising on podcasts was only $80 million last year, a research firm reported.

Let's hope these initiatives mean a long future for podcasting, and some remuneration for podcasters for all the hard work they put into creating their programs.