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GarageBand One. "Essentially with the flip of the switch, we are expanding the entire medium," says Ari Partovi, ceo of GarageBand.com, commenting on his plans to turn a profit on podcasting, as reported by Don Clark in The Wall Street Journal (5/23/05). Podcasting, as defined by Wikipedia "is a way of publishing sound files to the internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically." GarageBand.com, where unsigned artists post full-length MP3s in hopes of finding fans and maybe even landing a record deal, says it is making its entire catalog podcast-friendly and also "making it easy for users to subscribe." That means "it will essentially create instant podcasts for about 40,000 artists like this one who actively use the site, compared with an estimated 10,000 podcasts or so created up to now."
Known as GarageBand Podcast Studio, the new initiative will allow subscribers to "receive the content using podcast-player software (such as that available on ipodder.net) through email or a posting to personal pages at Yahoo Inc. or Microsoft Corp's MSN service. " The service further allows users to become "PeeJays" (Podcast Jockeys) by posting "playlists of recommended songs on the site," as well as "turn those into podcasts" by "adding commentary to the music ... To aid people without recording gear, the company is adding a tool to help users add commentary using a cellphone."
To make money, GarageBand "may insert advertising into podcasts or begin charging for some of the new features." Somewhat surprisingly, the venture actually is already profitable, making money "through a combination of advertising and premium services sold to musicians." The real breakthrough would be if the move into podcasting helps "GarageBand build an audience among consumers looking for new music." So far, most of the site's visitors are musicians. "The gating factor will be the quality of the music," says Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, who also says he agrees that "podcasting could attract advertising." Perhaps the potential here is personified by none other than Bo Bice, who competes tonight in the finals of American Idol. Bo is a long-time GarageBand.com member: garageband.com/artist/sugar_money
GarageBand Too. "Computers are the new garage," says James Rotondi, editor of Future Music magazine, as quoted by David Carr in The New York Times (5/23/05). "A lot of people who are making music right now have never recorded on tape," he adds. "The concept is completely foreign to them." That would include people like Michael Cobden, 28, who likes to record songs on his laptop wherever he might be -- in fact, on a recent afternoon he was hanging around Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, which inspired him to create a song right there called "Bryant Park." Michael says he does this sort of thing all the time: "We get together, we drink and smoke a lot, and then we make music ... Everybody sings and contributes, and we end up with a song. It's sort of like an audio photograph of the party."
Michael also comments: An artist is an artist, even if he is using things he found or stole and arranging them in an artful fashion ... There are many composers who never played an oboe, but they write the music and give it to an orchestra to play." That kind of composition is made relatively easy -- and cheap -- by software such as Apple's GarageBand, which "came preinstalled on 4.5 million Macs sold in the last 18 months. Another program, called Reason, propellerheads.se, has also sold "hundreds of thousands of copies," not to mention "many more pirated copies. Comments analyst Tim Barjian: "We are in the midst of a true consumer push to create music ... They now have the ability to storyboard a song by dragging and dropping."
The result may be less than listenable in many cases, but not so for a Idiot Pilot, idiotpilot.com, a pair of 18-year-olds who used "mostly free software they found on the web" to record a collection called "Strange We Should Meet Here" that ultimately won them a contract with Reprise Records. Meanwhile, more established artists, such as Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, "offered a ... download of the hit single, 'The Hand That Feeds,' that was broken into multiple tacks, allowing laptop aficionados to mix and mash up their own version of the song." As for Michael Cobden, he's still working his day job at a restaurant, mikesbistro.com. But he was amazed the other night when one of the hostesses was rocking out to one of his songs on her iPod. A "big thrill" he says, adding: "Now if I could just get her to throw her panties at me."
Tim Manners, editor
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