billpalmer.net

I'm not sure if it's gradual damage from the acid reflux I've had since I was a teenager, the years I spent talking over a computer lab full of collaborating students, or maybe some combination of both, but my voice tends to go out pretty quickly on me. A few years ago when the mainstream media all decided to take a ridiculous interest in one of my side projects, I said yes to every phone interview they offered me...and spent the majority of each day hoarse as a result. And when I first started podcasting back in 2005, I got so excited that I tried to crank out an episode every day - which lasted about a week before I completely lost my voice, put the project on the shelf, and didn't go back to podcasting for about a year.

So these days I try to avoid putting myself in one too many consecutive situations where I have to either talk loudly or sound good while talking for any period of time. When I'm scheduling phone interviews with musicians I never do two on the same day; the rock star I'm talking with may not care how bad I sound, but a good percentage of these interviews ultimately end up on the podcast, and the audience will notice if I sound like something crawled down my throat and died. I try not to even allow them to be on consecutive days if I can help it. Not that, frankly, I get too much say as far as what date and time these interviews typically take place.

So when I woke up this morning with my throat on fire, my first thought was uh-oh, that's not such great timing. Richard Patrick of Filter was calling this morning for an interview that's not only for an iProng Magazine cover story, it's for this upcoming week's cover story, meaning that the odds of being able to reschedule it in time were small. And since Filter's new album is coming out the same day the cover story is coming out, I didn't want to look at the possibility of sliding the Filter story to the next available cover, either. So I did the interview. I made it through ok.

And now you know who's on the cover of the May 13th issue. Hey Man Nice Shot. Take a Picture. Yeah, that Filter. I love putting bands on the cover the day their new album comes out. And I continue to be amazed that in this era of industry paranoia, the major and indie labels are generally willing to trust me with advance copies of the new albums before they're released so I know what I'm talking about during the interviews. For the record, the new Filter record is really strong. I offered them the cover based on the strength of the new single alone, so I guess I got lucky.

Side note: Filter's Richard Patrick is the brother of Robert Patrick, who played the bad guy in Terminator 3. Small world.

But the short of it is that I unwittingly had another phone interview scheduled for tomorrow morning, which I was determined to get through but was secretly (okay not so secretly, dear readers) relieved when I was given word this evening that the band needed to push it back to next week. No worries, since that story isn't scheduled to publish until June. And no, I'm not telling you who they are yet. Except that you've almost definitely heard of them.

Of course this week we didn't have a musician on the cover at all. I'm not going to make a big deal about finally putting a podcaster on the cover, because frankly, it shouldn't have taken this long. We've been slacking in that department, and hopefully the Goodnight Burbank cover story helps begin to correct that. There are more coming. Promise.

Someone will invariably ask, so I'll just go ahead and answer it now: the timing of our first podcasting cover story has nothing to do with the fact that both major podcasting magazines, Podcast User Magazine and Blogger & Podcaster Magazine, have gone on unofficial hiatus. I've always intended to do the occasional iProng podcasting cover story, the schedule just finally worked out properly this week. It'll always important for iProng to provide a good amount of podcasting coverage, but at the same time it'll always be just one of several things we cover. Bottom line is the podcasting industry needs its podcasting-specific magazines, and I'll be smiling wide when both magazines come back to us in full form.

On a personal level, the winds of change seem to be in full effect around here lately, in more ways than one. I've ended up spending a little more time hiding out here in Florida than I was originally planning. Things got so busy with the magazine that I've kept putting off my return, one pushback after another, but now it's time to return to the real world. When walking down to the lake and seeing if you can spot an alligator along the shoreline becomes a daily highlight, it's time to get out of dodge. Monday (assuming I have a voice to speak with) I'll be on the phone all day scouting out potential Hollywood apartments. Feels good. It's time. I plan to be on a plane June 1st if not sooner.

Finally signed off on a media partnership I'd been negotiating with a major music festival for months. They've got an incredible lineup this year. Can't wait to make the announcement next week.

Accomplishment is not the same thing as making a difference, and quite often the accomplishments you're most proud of are things that no one outside of yourself and your immediate circle will ever know about or would even care about anyway. Over the past few months my (professional) accomplishments have begun to take place more in the public eye; for instance I've grown accustomed to people I don't know very well congratulating me on the accomplishment of landing one big name interview after another. But that doesn't mean I've actually made a difference. After all, you don't change anything by managing to be one of dozens interviews some famous person happens to grant during a period of heavy promotion.

A few folks have told me they thought I made a difference back in March when Adam Duritz of Counting Crows laid out his manifesto for the future of the music industry in an iProng Magazine cover story. In fact one musician told me that reading that story caused him to change his strategy for his own band. But if you listen to the audio of that interview, I didn't really have to do anything to get that story out of Duritz; he was going to tell that story to any journalist who wasn't going to cut him off. All I can really take credit for was understanding that what he was saying was important and including it in my story.

But this week was different. I interviewed Ed Roland of Collective Soul for fairly straightforward reasons: I own every album they've ever released, I've seen them in concert too many times to count, and the ten million albums they've sold tells me that readers would be interested as well. Worthwhile for me, worthwhile for the readers, done deal. But somewhere during the interview process I figured it out: Collective Soul was the rare famous band that was in an ideal position to go podsafe with seemingly nothing standing in their way. After all, when the lead singer of the band is also the owner of the record label, there's not likely to be a whole lot of red tape involved. So when Ed started asking me for iPhone buying advice during our interview, and I asked him for his thoughts on podcasting and he simply said "educate me," I took my shot. I told him that we would be using the audio recording of the interview on our podcast, and that it would be great if we could use the latest single as well. And he said yes. Told me to send the details to his people. By golly, it worked.

What does "podsafe" mean? It's pretty straightforward, really. As a podcaster, you don't have the right to play someone's copyrighted song in your show unless you have specific permission to do so. The popular notion that you can use up to thirty seconds of a song without permission, or that you acquire the right to use the song simply by buying the CD? Nothing more than unfortunate myths.

Granting permission on a case by case basis would be a nightmare for everyone involved, so people with more foresight than me created a Podsafe Music Network, in effect a clearing house for granting blanket rights for using songs in podcasts. Indie artists have flocked to it. In fact some of them have built their entire careers out of getting their songs played on podcasts and then seeing that popularity turn into album sales (the exact same reason bands send their songs to FM radio). But because all four major record labels apparently attended the same conference where someone spent a great deal of time and effort misinforming them about what a podcast actually is, getting any of the major labels to allow their artists' music to become podsafe is roughly equivalent to throwing eggs at a brick wall - you can keep trying all day long, but at the end you haven't made a dent. They're so sure that a podcast has something to do with streaming, and that you can somehow make it not downloadable, or that the embedded song would somehow only be available for a limited timeframe before it magically went poof, that it's not even a conversation you can keep a straight face while having with them.

But with Collective Soul not having been on a major label since 2001, and with the indie label controlled by the band and not the other way around, it was Ed Roland's call all the way. And sure enough, the day before we released the issue with Collective Soul on the cover, their latest single was officially added to the podsafe network. They'd have been this week's cover story one way or the other. After all, I requested the interview because they make great music, nothing more. But when the opportunity presented itself, I took my shot at making a difference, and surprisingly enough, it actually happened.

From our end all is means is that we got to play the song at the end of the Ed Roland interview which we released as a podcast episode the same day the magazine issue was released (a nifty little bit of hindsight-obvious synergy I wish I'd picked up on from the get-go). Far more importantly, any podcaster in the whole wide world can now play the new Collective Soul song on their shows. And a number already have, including some rather influential ones. Plenty more will soon.

What does it all add up to? Time will tell. Hopefully two things happen: one, other famous bands will take a cue from Collective Soul and perhaps convince their labels to allow them to try it themselves, and two, the mere fact that a famous band has thrown its hat into the podsafe ring will hopefully help shine a brighter light on the wealth of talented-but-yet-unknown-outside-of-podcasting-circles musicians who've been making their music podsafe for years.

Time will tell. But it feels like after interviewing all these rock stars, lining up all these cover stories, and after receiving so many congratulations on accomplishing something that hasn't necessarily changed anything, this week I might have finally made a tangible difference in an industry I've only begun covering fairly recently. Hopefully it's not the last time.