billpalmer.net

Half the headlines we'll get regarding our next issue will be about the fact that we've landed another household name of a rock band for the cover, and the other half will likely center around how the band on our next cover relates to the band on our current cover. Although I didn't try to plan it this way, it's just the order in which the interviews were granted to us, it's an obvious connection that everyone will instantly get - and I don't believe it's ever been done before. But headlines aside, the real story surrounding our April 2nd issue is that it will be our first "100% podsafe" issue.

What does that mean? For anyone not indoctrinated in the terminology, music is considered "podsafe" if it's been legally cleared to be played on podcasts. If you just randomly grab a song and throw it into your podcast, you're opening yourself up to getting sued by the artist, the label, and anyone else who can claim any rights to the song (the fact that you originally acquired the song legally means nothing in this case). But if an artist is forward-thinking enough to submit some or all of their music to the Podsafe Music Network, it gives podcasters like me the opportunity to play that song on my show with no fear of legal repercussions - and it's a healthy dose of free publicity for the musician involved. Sounds like a great idea, and it is, but the major labels still mostly steer clear of it, and hence most podsafe music comes from artists who are on indie labels or don't have a label.

Every single musician we're interviewing for our next issue has at least one "podsafe" song currently available to podcasters. But wait a minute, didn't I just say that the band on the next cover is a household name? Yep. After going indie, they launched the first single from their latest album in the podsafe network about a month before they released their latest album. The album has done really nicely on the iTunes and Billboard charts too (more evidence that giving away portions of your album can only help boost sales, not hurt them). And so yeah, we've got an interview with the famous band on the cover that happens to be podsafe, as well as interviews with a number of less famous musicians who actively participate in the podsafe music community.

Why? Simply put, we're making a statement to anyone who cares to listen. It's a statement I've been trying to subtly make since the magazine launched. In the beginning I had a decision to make about just what our musical approach was going to be. Should we do a bunch of cover stories featuring podsafe musicians from the community, and as a result end up being a magazine whose music content only gets read by that same community? Or should we interview a famous band for every issue, put them on the cover in order to reach a mainstream audience, and then feature podsafe musicians on the inside? I chose the latter, both because I felt it was best for the magazine and because I felt I was doing podsafe musicians more of a service by introducing them to a mainstream audience than by doing something insular that wouldn't have exposed them to anyone new.

Seven issues into it and I'm still working on the formula. For instance, our current issue, the one with Counting Crows on the cover, doesn't have interviews with any podsafe musicians on the inside. Sorry, my fault. That's not going to happen again if I can help it. No one from the community has complained to me about it, but I still feel like I missed an opportunity.

In any case, this time around, we're going to rectify that in spades. It's necessarily a response to last week's wasted opportunity; a 100% podsafe issue is something I've been wanting to do for awhile now. I've simply been waiting for an issue where I could actually do it. I didn't want to be hypocritical and do an "everyone in this issue is podsafe except the famous band on the cover" issue, because what exactly does that accomplish? I've just had to be patient until I was able to hit on a band that was both a household name and podsafe at the same time.

Truth be told, this is an interview I've been trying to land since early February, and I'd have wanted to do the interview whether they were podsafe or not. But as it's worked out, I finally have the opportunity to put a household name on the cover that will attract a mainstream audience while simultaneously saying "hey everyone, this famous band is podsafe, here's what being podsafe means, and here are some other podsafe musicians you should check out as well!"

We'll see what the upshot ends up being. With as much publicity as this next issue is likely to attract due simply to the fact that after fifteen years someone finally managed to get these two bands on consecutive covers of the same magazine, I hope that the 100% podsafe angle doesn't get lost in the shuffle. I know the podsafe community will pick up on the concept one way or the other, and I hope our mainstream readers manage to do the same.

I'll be looking for feedback, positive or otherwise, about how our first 100% podsafe issue turns out - so I can keep all of it in mind the next time we embark on such a project.

The new Counting Crows album debuted at number one in iTunes this week, and that means more for the future of digital music than most folks probably realize. Counting Crows happens to be on the cover of iProng Magazine this week, so yay for us, but that's not the point. What's important here is how they reached number one. Sure, they're a household name and this is their first new album in six years so there was a certain degree of pent-up demand. But in addition to sending a standard single to radio, Adam Duritz did something you're not supposed to do - or at least something his major record label told him he wasn't supposed to do: he gave away two other songs from the album as free MP3 downloads, even before the album was available.

Adam told me that the idea was to turn every iPod in the world into a Counting Crows radio station; instead of potential buyers just hearing the single on radio whenever they happened to randomly hear it, the two free songs could be listened to whenever, wherever, and however often potential buyers wanted to hear them.

And it worked. Three days after its release the new Crows album is still at number one - not just number one in their genre but number one across all music - and if that doesn't outright prove that giving away the two free downloads ultimately helped sales, it at least demonstrates that it didn't hurt anything. After all, you can't climb any higher on the charts than the top spot.

So the bottom line is that no one said to themselves "hey, I've got two free songs from the album, I was gonna buy the rest of the album but now I don't need to because I've already got fifteen percent of it for free." While that seems almost stupefying self-evident, it's precisely this basic concept that in all their paranoia the major labels somehow manage to totally fail to understand.

Adam said in our interview that the chairman of his label signed off on the idea of giving away the two free songs because Counting Crows have "been here a long time" and "worked really hard" but I suspect it had at least as much to do with the fact that famous rock stars who don't get their way have been increasingly willing to ditch their major label and set up shop on their own and that's got to have the labels concerned about making sure they take care of the household names they still have left.

Because this worked, and appears to have worked so overwhelmingly - as a result of free music having been given away, Universal's cash registers are ringing non-stop this week - just maybe this finally pries open the eyes of those at the labels who've been scared to death of the internet ever since they first heard the word "Napster" a decade ago. Maybe now they can finally begin to see the internet and digital music as the amazing promotional tools that they are. Maybe the next time a major label artist wants to give away some free songs from an upcoming album, they won't have to have the clout of Adam Duritz in order to get someone wearing a suit to say yes to them.

The major labels are shrinking in stature for sure. But like them or not, they're not going to die anytime soon and they're not going to become completely unimportant in the music industry. So anything that helps inch them toward seeing digital music not as the enemy, but as the future, is vital - even if it means force-feeding them a remedial lesson that the rest of us managed to grasp years ago. And this week's wildly successful demonstration that you can give away a few pieces of an album and have them come back and pay for more is a huge step forward.

So a friend of mine calls me today, one of my best friends in fact, to tell me what he thinks of the latest issue of the magazine. Which is noteworthy because, while he's paid cursory bits of attention to iProng over the past four years, he's only really done so because it's his friend's publication. Much the same as I only find his stories about policework interesting because they're his stories. But today he calls me to tell me that he just finished reading it and he thinks it's fantastic. Also to tell me that he thinks Colbie Caillat looks hot on the cover (I guess that settles which way he'd have voted in the cover contest if he'd been around for it), but mainly to tell me that he likes the issue overall. Says it reads like a real magazine.

He pauses to tell me that the gray bars running down the left and right sides of the website are ruining the white-on-black aesthetic (come to think of it he may be right), but then he gets onto his point, that being that he thinks I could take the issue as it is, in its current form, put it into print, and it would work as a print magazine. I don't agree with that particular premise, as the magazine is designed specifically to be viewed on a screen and not on paper, and we'd have to do a fair bit of re-imagining for a print version, but that's a topic for another day. The point here is that, for the first time since I've been doing this, going on my fifty-first month of trying, I've finally managed to produce something that's attracted his interest.

This has nothing to do with garnering the approval of my friends outside the industry. That's a nice bonus, but again, another topic for another day. Today's point of focus is the fact that my friend is a music lover who buys a fair amount of music through iTunes, and has bought his son an iPod, but isn't an iPod/iTunes/iPhone/Apple geek in any way, shape, or form. In other words, he's the target audience of iProng Magazine. And unless he was doing a really good job of faking it today, he loves it.

So maybe I'm onto something after all.

I've just never bought into the idea that an all-geek all-the-time publication is going to be appealing to anyone beyond the geekiest one percent of the populace, and I've sarcastically joked that I'm willing to leave that particular segment to others as I'm content to settle for appealing to the other ninety-nine percent. The kicker, of course, is that the geekiest one percent are generally the easiest to reach through technology-based distribution, and tend to have a disproportionately large amount of sway in our industry. Then again, they're a tiny group in comparison to the overall user base. But now I can't help but wonder if both groups can't be appealed to simultaneously.

My goal is to get things to the point where every iPod/iPhone/iTunes user alive will find a large enough portion of each issue of the magazine to be sufficiently interesting to them that they're glad they took the time to download it and are willing to do so again the next time around. Can't be all things to all people, but if we strike the right balance, I think we can be something to everyone. I don't know how close we are to achieving that goal, so we trudge on toward it.

On another note, I've been informed that someone at my former workplace printed out a copy of the cover of the latest issue and posted it on the employee bulletin board. But as I said, garnering the approval of my friends outside the industry is another topic for another day.

Sometimes we get busy, distracted and we miss out on the milestones we thought we were looking forward to until they're nearly upon us or until they've passed. Which reminds me that my birthday is two weeks from now, and proves to me for the first time that you do in fact stop paying attention to such things once you've reached thirty. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at "April 2nd" on iProng Magazine's publishing roster, it's a Wednesday so there's an issue coming out that day, without it lighting up in my head until now that the date is also my birthday. I don't have any plans.

But my impending thirty-first year isn't the milestone in question today. No, it's one that I vaguely knew was coming up but didn't know exactly when, I knew it was in March or May, something with an M, but couldn't tell you much more specifically. Just now I looked it up and it turns out that five years and eight days ago, I started blogging, right here on this very site. Actually my recollection is that I started out not at billpalmer.net but at billpalmer.blogspot.com because that's about as much as I knew about blogs and domains and hosting and all that good stuff back in the day.

I remember the night I first started it. Where I was sitting, what computer I was using, wondering if anyone would ever actually see it or even know that it existed. Perhaps it's ironic, at least by Alanis' definition, that my five year blogging anniversary came and went during a month and a half long stretch of nothingness here which represents the emptiest, most barren stretch this blog has ever seen.

Too busy living to do any writing? That's not an excuse, nor is it accurate. Look at the magazine and you'll see that I write for a living. And on Twitter I post roughly twenty updates about my life per day, so you could say that the past nine months have represented the most active blogging I've ever done. I'm just not doing it here.

I've been tempted, sorely, to conclude that my Twitter postings are my blog now, and even considered hard-wiring them so they show up here automatically. But then I had another thought, a revelation that didn't come to me until I started writing this extended monologue. Can everything that's happening in my life, all my thoughts about everything, be boiled down to a series of sub-140 character quips? And the answer is no. I'm happy when I'm writing, and this blog has no character limits, so I can't help but wonder if it isn't time to get back to it.

Five years of blogging here is a long time, especially for someone like me. There hasn't been any stage of my life that's lasted more than five years. iProng will reach the milestone in ten months, and that's really just getting started if anything, but it's evolved so much since its inception that while I still feel like I'm working toward to same goal, I can't pretend it's the same beast.

But this blog, I don't know. It's still just me putting words to a page. I've changed more than it has, not the other way around. It started out as a Macs in Education blog, but that's just because that's what was on my mind at the time. Later it became a Macintosh general blog after I'd left education circles and wanted to take on the entire industry. Once that ran its course and I found I'd parked myself journalistically over on the iPod side of the fence, the blog followed along. And when that led to a real publication, the blog followed me around wherever the publication led me.

So why is it now that things have taken off, now that they're really happening, now that I've got so much going on that I'm bursting on the insides wanting to tell the whole world about it and having to almost duct tape my mouth shut to keep from blowing the surprises before it's time for them to be published, that I'm leaving my blog blank for a month at a time? Maybe that's just it. At any given time these days there are in fact things I'm not ready to share, I want to but it's not the appropriate time, so rather than blog with those self-limitations I subconsciously opt not to blog at all.

It's the biggest one yet, but beyond whispering it to a handful of people who aren't going to spill it anyway, I haven't said word one about who's going to be on the March 26th cover. Nine days ago when I was able to confirm it, I was bouncing off the ceiling. Four days ago when I conducted the interview, I felt more alive than at any other point in my career. Today I got ahold of the cover photo and created the cover layout, the whole time having to remind myself that this was in fact real and not just me mocking up an imaginary cover. And yet I've said nothing publicly. That's not true. I've hinted, in fact more hinting than most folks probably realize, but the most definitive thing I've given away so far is the fact that there's a pink suit involved. And the more I look at the cover photo, I'm now inclined to think that the pink suit might actually be closer to beige.

Do I keep dropping hints, keep being sly? Am I letting out a little bit at a time just to keep from bursting, or am I just trying to build hype? This doesn't need hype. Not this one. Not with this kind of timing. Sometimes things just come together. You'll understand once it's been released. But regardless it'll be far from the last time I'll have something cool, something groundbreaking, that I'll want to immediately shout about from the rooftops, and I'll again be wresting with just how tightly I can keep a secret, and whether I should.

In this age of new media and openness we're not supposed to have secrets, are we? Just this evening during a conversation with a friend I bragged that in an age where our favorite websites, employers, and governments are tracking our personal information in ways they have no business doing, I've managed to beat the system by purposely putting more out there about myself than anyone could ever hope to learn about me through underhanded means.

Want to know where I'm at? Check twitter. Want to know who my friends are? Check facebook. Want to know what I had for lunch today? I'm sure that's out there somewhere. Want to reach me? Everyone knows how to, in too many ways to count. And that's the way I want it. But unlike the person I interviewed this week, it doesn't have to be that way for me. I'm not a rock star, people aren't asking for my autograph, I'm not trapped into anything. I could do what I do for a living while remaining in total anonymity, and yet instead I choose to put everything out there about myself to an almost over the top extent.

So why am I not willing to tell you who's on the cover of the March 26th issue? Because you don't want to know. Not yet anyway. I tell you now and it's old news by the time it comes out. It's like when you're a kid and you stumble upon your impending Christmas present a week early and that fact makes you happy for, well, a week, until the day comes and you realize that the only suspense remaining is whether or not you can pretend to look surprised. So I'm not going to ruin it for you. That's it, I'm actually sacrificing by not telling you. I'm taking a hit for you. I'm keeping my mouth stapled shut for once, for the next week and a half, so it'll come as a surprise to you when the issue drops.

The things I do for you guys. Yeah, I know, if I really cared about you guys I'd start blogging again on a more regular basis. We'll see. But in any case, here's to another five years.

And you know, I think that suit might actually be pink after all.