Podosphere discovers new stupidity
As we speak, the podosphere is experiencing HISTORY IN THE MAKING! The first ever worldwide simulpodcast of Chance & the Choir's live concert is underway.
Okay, there's so much wrong with that statement it elicits a sad chuckle from the cockles of my ironic heart. Now, let me issue a disclaimer before I keep bitching -- I like Chance, I really do. He's a good musician and he's been great for the whole music podcasting community. His website is as fun as his music and the level of audience participation he generates is outstanding.
That being said, the whole notion of a "simulpodcast" is pretty freaking stupid. First of all, it's not really happening "as we speak," first and foremost because you probably won't read this until hours and hours after I type it. The internet is rarely "live." Secondly, the music itself isn't even happening "as I type" with the exception of 5 streaming internet radio stations. To the extent that Chance's concert is in fact being "broadcast" simultaneously so that all of the fans of 5 net stations hear it at once, that is pretty cool (unless you don't like Chance & the Choir). But the other 33 purveyors of this event? NOT live. Sure, about half an hour ago, 33 podcasters clicked "Publish" and updated their RSS feeds to point all of our podcatchers toward 33 copies of almost the exact same goddamn file.
The trick is, hardly anyone is listening. This isn't a simulpodcast, this is hardly even a simul-download. I get far fewer pings to my feed on weekends because lots of subscribers have let their computers go to sleep while they go enjoy the 3-D world out of doors. When they log on again before bed, or before work tomorrow, their computers will happily download the concert, but I for one won't get around to listening to it until at least Wednesday. To put it in super-dorky terms, I bet that if we assume most people listen to weekly podcasts, then the time at which people actually listen to this "simulpodcast" will have a distribution that looks rather like a Weibull or maybe lognormal, with its peak probability density sometime between Monday evening and Tuesday afternoon. Don't ask where I got that idea, it smells a lot like my ass.
The true defect of the "simulpodcast" concept is its waste of bandwidth and disk space. It makes a helluva lotta sense for Chance, as he doesn't have to foot the bill for distributing that much data to the collective audience of the 33 podcasts. (I notice that on the front page of his site right now, you can get to all the podcasts but there's no place to download the show directly from him.) But for the listening audience, it's pretty annoying. I don't really listen to many music shows anymore, save ones like DDR which, like the wtfBBQ, has a funny story or two in the mix with the music. But when I did, I listened to bandtrax.net, Insomnia Radio, The Tartan Podcast, De-Fi Radio, and Accident Hash. Congratulations, podosphere, your average listener like me will now have FIVE COPIES of the same damn concert. This is particularly silly in the case of The Tartan Podcast, which I subscribed to so that I might hear music from, oh, say....SCOTLAND.
Alright. Back to your business.