Colin: “the phonograph and radio drastically influenced the music that was produced, simply by creating new markets. Would 80’s rock bands have worn as much makeup if their faces weren’t being beamed via MTV to millions of homes?”

Pinder joked that “only dorks make podcasts”, and yeah, a lot of the talk-show podcasts I've heard are dorky. But why aren't MP3 sites like Fluxblog—to pick the most obvious example—have a podcast feed? They could tomorrow by selecting "SmartCast™", which puts the first MP3 URL in the post into the enclosure element, effectively making it a podcast. (I created a Feedburner feed converting their Atom feed into a podcast feed for personal use, but due to ambiguities in the specification, it only takes the first MP3 link.) Releasing individual MP3s via podcast makes a lot of sense for bands, since it's an effective distribution mechanism straight from computer to portable digital music player, if you as a consumer have everything setup right, that is, though digital music players are baking podcasting in.

Some music I listen to comes in podcast form, e.g. the MP3s from Fluxblog, the CBC Radio 3 and KEXP podcasts (the latter approaching bands that want their music played but may not necessarily have a record deal), and some sites like Accordion Guy's. I also subscribe to Staccato, though it's a radio show where I would prefer to have a podcast feed of the individual songs played. The radio show format, unless it's a talk show or monologue, which I'm not very interested, doesn't make a lot of sense with a song-based show, since there's nothing really technologically preventing people producing podcasts to give you the individual songs and then make your comments about the song, rich with links and graphics (and maybe video?), in a weblog post about the song. In other words, for song distribution, if you're an artist, take the radio out of podcasting and use it as 'just' a distribution channel for your music.