The Revolution will be Podcast!

I was poking over at Marilyn's blog, and she mentioned that she just couldn't understand how people got so hung up on the whole iPod thing. I know that there are more people than just her that are trying to figure out this phenom, so I thought I might try to take a stab at explaining it.

So, here's what I feel is at the heart of the iPod revolution. I knew it before I owned one from using iTunes, and it all came true when I finally got one.

For me it's mainly about 2 different things (for people who get past the cool fashion "in" thing of owning one).

1. It may be different where you are (because I know in NYC when I visited there was a huge variety of radio staitions with every possible style of music imaginable) but in most locations the iPod is an escape from the radio landscape that has become so simillar. There's no variety. The same songs play over and over again and every station seems to be playing the same songs.

Now, on the iPod, you can put all your CDs (and for me that's about 250)--and all the songs you can download as singles from the iTunes music store (so you can collect all the great tunes you wouldn't buy an entire album to get). Not to mention all these indie free legal downloads from sites like Garageband.com and 15MegsofFame.com---they've got some really good unsigned stuff that they're giving away.

With all that I've got like 23 days of continous music that I could listen to on a white iPod without ever hearing the same song twice.

Put that together with the shuffle function and you bring your music collection back to life!

Because you get songs randomly put up against each other in ways you'd never thought to do your self and the experience feels completely new, even for music that you've had for years.
This combination is so potent that there are even some broadcast stations in California that are experimenting with letting people come in and simply plugging their iPod into the board and let it shuffle through someones music collection over the airwaves (and some clubs are doing this too---letting guest get 15 minutes of time to DJ using thier iPod).

Right now my iPod just went from Jackson5 "ABC" to Daft Punk "Better,Faster,Stronger". Crazy--and so cool.

2. As of this last Tuesday you can no longer assume that people are listening to just music. This Tuesday Apple released iTunes 4.9 with support for PODCASTing!

They have 3000 Podcasts available for free that have weekly or daily shows---and another 5000 on deck to be added, they're telling us. These are like radio shows that are downloaded instead of broadcast.

They range from the professional to the amature, and there is a huge range of topics that each show could be about. Some are just audio versions of blogs where people talk about their life, others are topic specific like movies or tech or politics or whatever, and others are shows already on the radio but now you can listen any time you like (such as I download NPRs "On the Media"). And there are underground music shows too, it's not all just spoken.

And new as of Tuesday is stuff developed by the pros just for download only--like from Disney and ABC, who is doing a news bite show, not to mention ESPN and the BBC.

I've got like 40 shows that I follow so on any given day I've got from 4 to 8 hours of content I can partake in. And it's a whole variety of stuff----news, talk, fiction, quiz shows, tech (lots of tech, of course), comedy.

The internet just got a whole lot cooler, and with the iPod (or other MP3 player) now you can take it with you.

I encourage everyone to download 4.9 and give it a whirl. In 5 years the broadcast radio will be saying "what happened" like the newspapers are right now with the falling readership (because everyone is getting news on websites) and broadcast T.V. was after cable rolled into town.

C'mon---all the cool kids are doing it. ;-)