Brian Buckman

"Are we ready yet?" Thomas Shade asks impatiently, somehow managing to light a cigarette, plug in a mic, pour his second glass of Chivas and bitch simultaneously.

Hand-written notes, web-page printouts and scraps of paper scatter the table. On the wall hangs a photorealistic sketch depicting Jesus applauding the efforts of a juggler under the phrase "Always With You" and a black-and-white photo of a man standing his ground against a line of armed tanks in Tiananmen Square. The only things more plentiful than the show notes and smartass sundry are the beer cans and whiskey bottles. The only things more plentiful than the intoxicants are the cigarette butts.

Crammed into a small linoleum-lined kitchen like prisoners in an under-funded AV shop, the four members of the Viking Youth Power Hour (http://www.thefeedlot.org)--a Chicago-based "podcast"--linger distractedly, drunkenly, each pursuing their own avenue of intoxication prior to the taping of their recent show on "Evolution." Knee-deep in blurry distractions, I'm skeptical my friendly hosts--with whom I occasionally make my own contributions--will deliver on the promised results of this "citizen journalism of a higher integrity." But just as I'm about to give up and surrender myself to my own dark pursuits, Jason, the engineer and Southern-drawling captain of this strange ship, sits forward into his microphone and slips out, "We're rolling." His declaration sounds more like a question, but, upon hearing his call to action, his fellow showmen--Matt Shirley, Alex Cohn and Thomas Shade--snap to in a moment of Olympic transformation.

"From the icy shores of Lake Michigan, it's the Viking Youth Power Hour--Quit dreaming like a pussy!" The music is cued, spines are straightened, and for the first time this evening I feel like I'm in a real studio watching a real radio show being produced. But I'm not. This is a podcast--a new, sexier, more articulated version of its antiquated cousin the blog that has been turning tech geeks into self-styled radio stars overnight.

Armed with little more than a microphone, a laptop and server space, podcasters are conceptualizing, creating and distributing these homemade radio shows to an international audience that is growing exponentially and creating quite a stir in professional broadcasting circles.

"It's brilliant really," Viking co-host Matt Shirley tells me over a few post-show pints at a local watering hole. "Just when it seemed there was no escape from the Clear Channel radio beast and its FCC whore bride, along comes podcasting. Now real people have a space to create challenging content the way they want to hear it."

Some may remember long-gone days spent whiling away Saturday evenings watching MTV and the Headbanger's Ball. Always home to the freshest hot licks from the hard-rock industry in the late eighties, the Headbanger's Ball was as famous for its host, the lion-maned Adam Curry, as it was for its weekly menagerie of metal bands. For Generation X, Headbanger's Ball helped forge a media-driven image of a world where creativity orbited only around those few individuals initiated into the cabal of celebrity. But since the Internet boom of the middle nineties, the reverence for celebrity has made room for a new, more authentic, DIY ethic that extends to everything from desktop publishing to merchandising, music, lifestyle and beyond.

Fast-forward to 2003 and this same Adam Curry, without the mall hair, had developed a program for his computer allowing him to automatically download and store MP3s of a radio show he was hosting in the Netherlands; thus the first podcasting software, iPodder, was created. Realizing the limitations of his program, Curry made his code available to the open-source community, and reported back the developments daily in what is now considered the first-ever podcast, "The Daily Source Code." From there the fever caught. In just over a year's time, podcasting has grown to a very real threat to commercial radio, with podcasts already numbering more than 15,000.

However, more startling than the number of programs being created is the number of listeners tuning in. A survey just released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that 29 percent of U.S. adults who own MP3 players--or more than six million people--have downloaded a podcast. Although this number seems almost impossibly high, and the survey claimed an error margin of 7.5 percent, it does indicate something significant: people are listening.

But what makes podcasts so alluring, aside from the ease with which they can be made and distributed, is that they are not confined to the scheduling constraints of traditional radio. Using a freeware media aggregator like iPodderX or Pod2Go, a listener downloads their choice of podcasts and the aggregator automatically adds these shows, as they become available, to the listener's MP3 player (despite the name, podcasts do not require an iPod for listening). What this translates to is something both satellite radio and traditional radio have been incapable or unwilling to offer: an `on demand' radio service designed by the listener, free of charge or annoying advertisements (so far) and untouched by the puritanical paws of the FCC.

"It's an ideal means of having true community radio contributed to by anyone," says another local podcaster, Jascha Dub, who runs several online projects including a first of its kind podcast, "Local Area Security," with news and interviews focused on information security. He is also publishing a book on podcasting through Turning Point Press detailing the hows and whys of podcasting in hopes of making this medium more accessible to those less technologically inclined.

"Some [blogs] are becoming known for breaking big news; podcasting is bound to head in the same direction. With cell phones and other devices being more enabled to record quality sound, and even video, the reporting options will truly be in the palm of your hand all the time. This is why I see Big Media becoming more eager to get into podcasting."

And Big Media is indeed taking notice. Clear Channel just announced a major overhaul of its Internet strategy, with a major component being five-minute ad-supported segments available for download from its station sites. But while some podcasters see this as a miscalculated game of catch-up on the part of Clear Channel, others see it as a major opportunity for the Davids of podcasting to jockey Goliath for a quick ride to listenership.

"They can go fuck themselves, they can go for it," Chicagoan Richard Bluestein tells me over the phone. Bluestein, better known to his fans as Madge Weinstein, the demagogic host of podcasting's most acerbic show, "Yeast Radio" (http://www.yeastradio.com), sees podcasting exploding "like Starbucks" and feels that Clear Channel's attempts to belly up to the bar will only chasm out the pathways with greater ferocity. "What's happening is a huge convergence of media and entertainment, literally and figuratively. And if it brings more recognition to the artists creating the content, it's a good thing."

Another person excited about Clear Channel's new strategy is Chris McIntyre, the creator of Podcastalley.com, the web's premier directory of podcasts and a major hub for community discussions. "I'm looking forward to what the commercialization will do to podcasting. There is going to be an enormous amount of innovation, content and maybe even money in this podcasting thing because of this.... what are you doing to be a part of it?"

For some, these opportunities have already become a reality. Benjamen Walker writes and produces "Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything," a show that, like its name implies, constellates vastly divergent issues into weekly audio portraits combining fact and fiction into wonderfully humanistic themes through outré content. Previously "Theory of Everything" was distributed through Walker's website, http://www.toeradio.org, and a few college radio stations. Now, with the help of his podcast, Walker's show was picked up by WBEZ in Chicago and offered a Saturday afternoon slot.

"'BEZ is really the best big station on the network; it's just so great they picked up my show," Walker says, adding that he sees podcasting not as a threat to radio, but as a model that, once adopted, will extend radio's relevancy, expanding the potential for content into areas that may have previously been too risky to chance. "A station could offer more shows than it has time for now on a so-called schedule. I think that the key is to find out how to use both the radio and the Internet--the real success stories will be the ones that use both."

Others are taking a different approach to podcasting's burgeoning explosion. Adam Curry, the grandpappy of podcasting, has spearheaded Podshow.com, an attempt to coalesce podcasters and advertisers under one branded space in hopes of finding strength--and money--in numbers. It's the hope of podshow.com to create a network of shows; a kind of podcast radio station, which will draw listeners of differing interests and bait them into a kind of cross-casting situation. Some podcasters, however, are skeptical that Curry may be exploiting the communal nature of podcasting and the open-source community to garner a dollar or two for himself. Others are simply focusing their efforts on perpetuating the community spirit that has carried podcasting to its present level of success.

"It's all about community and learning," says Brian Russell, creator of "Audio Activism" (http://www.audioactivism.org), a podcast focusing on "metadata about media activism." Russell is coordinating PodcasterCon; the first free, non-commercial podcast conference of its kind. "It is an anti-expo without swag, without product promotion, and a way to keep podcasting fun!" Russell's motivation for initiating PodcasterCon is to keep the community balanced in light of the seeming money-making opportunities on the horizon. "Many times when folks start companies with great intentions, the bottom line forces them to make decisions they may not want to make. Many times concerns for individuals go out the window for the sake of keeping a company solvent. In short, happiness is more important to me than money."

But pursuing fun in this day and age can be more complicated than simply pursuing one's pleasures. Already a chill has been cast across podcasters who publish music shows featuring unlicensed music. ASCAP has issued a podcasting license available for under $300 annually, but what many podcasters--the majority of whom are not lawyers--discovered was that an ASCAP license only allows you to perform an artist's song live, it does not allow you to play the original piece for any kind of public performance; other, more expensive licenses and contracts are required for that.

Russell hopes to solve some of these problems with PodcasterCon. "We need to give podcasters the tools and knowledge to conduct their own business and represent themselves. We must protect our rights to communicate with each other and keep podcasting fun!"

It's almost dawn and the Viking Youth Power Hour has just finished recording its fourth segment of the night. The air is thick with smoke and I'm not sure whether or not the Vikings have solved any issues related to evolution, but I am intrigued by many of the questions they've raised along their journey. Because of the medium--and their own swashbuckling approach to the world about them--the Vikings can invoke challenging, important ideas like "Is consciousness trying to destroy its host?" and not worry about irking censors or satisfying a bottom line. In many ways podcasting is the ideal field to bring a real voice back to the people.

"The technology allows, at least at the moment, for the circumventing of traditional media structures," Viking Matt says, removing his headphones for the last time tonight. "The bloated fat cats wiping their asses with hundred dollar bills no longer have a total monopoly on the equipment necessary to disseminate content to a large market." It's as if, in a last-ditch effort to rescue itself from total obliteration, the spirit of radio has forced its will upon a new format built from previously existing parts. This spirit, seemingly forged from humanity's tenacious appetite for truth, is empowering citizens of the world to feel they have the capacity to elicit change once again. And if change is not possible, it is at least offering the ability to participate.

"The great thing about podcasting," Richard Bluestein tells me in closing, applying the final smudges of bright orange lipstick as he prepares to become the "bloated lesbian" Madge Weinstein once again, "is that it gives me a voice. Without my podcast I probably wouldn't have one."

(2005-04-12)

Also by Brian Buckman

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