This Trevor Dann (yes that one, formerly Radio 1 and now Radio Academy) session from PodCampUK taken by Dean is very good…interesting analogy with the fanzines, and pirates.
I wish I’d gotten out of bed to see that (this was the first session around 9)…I agree with what he’s saying about radio changing and different media, but I don’t totally agree with what he said about the softly softly approach – history will bear me out on the fact that both softly softly and disobedience are needed; the pirates had to go and do their thing first – I’m sure the people doing the pirates tried the established approach and got pissed off.
Fanzines are closest to that spirit cos they also ignored most of the legal and design red tape, and the 6 months+ before an article about a long-dead scene even appears, and proved very popular. I’m reading ‘Rip it Up and Start Again’ by Simon Reynolds atm, which talks about Sniffin’ Glue and the importance of other alternative media to get the punk and post punk message across -which was mostly ‘Do It Yourself!’
I have a sense that all of what Trevor calls ‘radio’ will become less and less about frequencies and analog broadcast and more about niches and DAB and online streaming and satellite, and the digital explosion will bring more ‘podcast’ style shows, like Chris Vallance’s PodsAndBlogs whereas unlike now where form is aping the media it’ll be about everything and specific niches, yup nichecasting. And targetted niches will become more valuable; rather than this current scattergun approach.
Remains to be seen if the Podcasters Will Inherit the Earth though. What I do know is that it won’t happen if we all play by their (old media) rules.
Podcasters totally pwn social media, the online space, the blogosphere, etc. compared to old media broadcast entities, we are from around here and mostly they are the slightly suspicious weekend punks sniffing around for some cool. Don’t let them steal it.
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