Magnatune soon to release two sets of podcast shows

I'll shortly be releasing two podcast show series featuring all Magnatune music.

My current plan is to have two sets of podcasts:

1) for every 6 months for every genre, a "new at Magnatune" podcast
2) every week for every genre, a podcast from the entire catalog (for that genre)

I'll probably also do "new" and "weekly" podcasts of all genres mixed together, for those of you who have wide-ranging tastes. All the podcasts will be around one hour in length.

I hope to get the listed on Apple's podcast directory, as well as the other major directories.

I'll probably make the hour-long mp3s available through the Coral CDN, so that if were to get huge demand for the podcasts, the bandwidth would be able to handle it (the one downside to podcasts for us is that people subscribe and download stuff that they may never listen to, the Coral CDN fixes that problem)

I'll be making "historical" podcasts going back 2 1/2 years, so you can hear the "what's new" show from 2 years ago, if you want!

I know that both Joel and Jan want to make their own podcasts of their favorite music, and if I ever let them have a few hours free, we'll also add those.

Any other ideas for podcasts are very much welcome, as well as suggestions for directories to get them listed in...

-john

Comments

[Giovanni Bogula]

Great,

I frequently use your music for my lutecast.blogspot.com and I am very happy about your policy towards podcasting.
I am looking forward to your own productions.

Keep up the good work
W.G. Bogula

[Swaroop C H]

Are you going to create podcasts for each genre separately, or focus on a particular genre each week?

[John Buckman]

"Are you going to create podcasts for each genre separately, or focus on a particular genre each week?"

What I've decided is that each genre separately will have its one podcast, and they'll be added to as new music for that genre comes in. Besides the top genres on the first magnatune page (classical/rock/world/etc) I'm also planning more focussed podcasts, such as JS Bach, all Piano, Indian classical and a few others...

I'm currently working on the technology for this, and am probably 2 or 3 weeks away from launching them.

-john

[Nick Busigin]

John, I think the Magnatune Podcast idea is a brilliant one! As well as podcasts based on the various genres you have, it may be worth considering themes such as "Music for Films" or possibly "Music with Artist Interviews and Commentary". Come to think of it, having artists create Podcasts based on their work may be worth considering as well, and may save you some time and effort (possibly just requiring some editorial input).

Nick

[Charlie]

How about Magnatune artists interviewing other Magnatune artists?

[Jade Leary]

This may be a blatant attempt at self-publicity but in response to Nick who suggested artist podcasts, I'd just like to let you guys know that I've been doing a podcast these past months called The LetterXpodcast following the production of my upcoming album Fossildawn (which should be out here shortly). The production is now over but all 10 related episodes (1-10) are available from my website.

I've now obviously changed the focus of the show, but it's still going and features a different Magnatune artist every week.

I think Magnatune podcasts are a great idea btw.

[Henryk Gerlach]

Why don't you offer the hourlong mp3s as bittorents? Because iTunes does not support it yet? -Well, they should (and will, since more and more podcasts will use it).

Best regards,
Henryk

[John Buckman]

Why don't you offer the hourlong mp3s as bittorents? Because iTunes does not support it yet? -Well, they should (and will, since more and more podcasts will use it).

The obvious reason for not offering torrent versions of the podcasts is that most podcast subscription software (ie, iTunes) doesn't support it. Instead, I'm planning on using Coral CDN as the back-end for the podcasts, which provides bittorrent like features, namely a p2p distributed network, but feeds to files over standard http, so that it works with standard podcast software. See my recent podcast on Coral for more info on this.

[alexandre van de sande]

I came here searching exactly for that answer: had magnatune made a podcast?

I am rather curious on how you are going to do it. Which one are you?

1-a personalized podcast, handpicked and commented by a dj would be the ideal, but you would need a gigantic infraestructure.

2-Not podcasts, but more like a podcast for podcasters, like an automatic rss feed linking every music in a genre individually. This would act as a tool for podcasters discovering your music and featuirng them. You might consider creating other features in your site giving tools to podcasters so they can reach youa lot like the podshow team is doing. They have a better marketing team (ie adam curry) but magnatune is a step ahead by licensing it as CC not a quick made "podsafe" license.

3-an automatic aggregation of mp3, which seems to fit your description. But then in that case how you would introduce the artist and say what the listener was hearing? T2S ? This can be tricky, as a big part of the podcast is the fact that you hear someone you feel connected with, not a machine delivering unknown music.

The best luck to magnatune.

[John Buckman]

In response to what the podcast will be, it will be:

3-an automatic aggregation of mp3, which seems to fit your description. But then in that case how you would introduce the artist and say what the listener was hearing? T2S ? This can be tricky, as a big part of the podcast is the fact that you hear someone you feel connected with, not a machine delivering unknown music.

and instead of using "Text to speech" it'll have a woman announcer, who has a nice DJ voice, so it'll be pleasant and understandable.

I'm still working out how frequently the podcasts should come out for the sub-genres, such as (say) Heavy Metal or Indian Classical. I could have one weekly, that favors new releases but goes into the back-catalog. Or, I could have them be infrequent, and only include new releases...

Right now, I'm leaning toward imitating the way radio stations work, with high, medium and low rotations. In high rotation would be recently added albums (maybe only the past 90 days), especially the first and second song on the albums. Medium would be the complete recent albums, back 6 months, and low rotation would be everything else.

-john