As a quick follow up on my earlier post regarding podcasting, I was thinking about a potentially interesting combination on my drive home yesterday: emusic.com serving up their DRM-free MP3’s via podcasting.
The use cases would be many: a feed of your top 2 or 3 bands, a feed of new releases in a genre you pick, a feed of most popular new tracks, etc. It would certainly help with one of my big complaints about emusic – which is discovery. If I forget to visit, my monthly allotment goes unused. The ability to lump it in with my regular pull from podcasts would be a definite plus. Throw in the fact that my tracks would be automatically added to iTunes and I think it’s potentially huge – for both me and emusic.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem. From what I can tell, private and secured RSS feeds – which emusic would likely need to enforce – are not easy to do. SilverOrange investigates some of the issues here. In addition, the feed would need some intelligence in terms of who’s subscribed to what, who’s downloaded what, etc.
Given the potential for this sort of approach, however, I think that the RSS world should be taking a close look at the issues involved. Forget the emusic question – do you think bands would like to offer up a ‘cast of selected tracks for subscribers or visitors, bypassing record companies in the process? I do, even if it’s teaser material (bootlegs, etc) that they don’t intend to distribute commercially. Imagine a world where you hear a band on the radio, cruise over to their site, feed the RSS into your podcasting tool and it automagically shows up in your media player.
If we want to see podcasting explode, I think this is an almost surefire way to do that.
