Vikings, yes we can!

Another month has passed, and all of the Innotune vikings are busy decorating for christmas at the Innotune HQ. But before we stuff ourselves full of christmas food, candy, and viking aquavit – let’s take a look at what we brought you in November.

Marcus showcased the very talented producer Fredrik Ohr from Sweden in his post, and we took a look at a really facinating online production suite (?) called Hobnox. It’s absolutely worth trying out, and you can do so right here. All of the guys at Innotune were born among leather jackets and hairy guys; yes, I’m talking about the 80′s. And guess what, the 80′s are back stronger than ever. Endal showed us this by recommending Relation, a UK based duo making lovely 80′s synth-pop.

We caused quite a few discussions among people on forums and in social media this month (Believe me, we’ve had a LOT of discussions internally as well), and it all started with the fantastic Way Out West podcast that you can download right here.

The source of the discussion was that we received mails from some prominent labels that they mean a “podcast” is defined by Steve Jobs. In other words: Our extravagant, fantastic, fabulous, classy, trashy and smashing (yeah, we’re proud…) podcast was only to be distributed via iTunes. So we had to choose: Drop a very important label and risk to loose even more of them, or drop the mp3 download. Our mission is to bring fantastic electronic music to our listeners, and we need labels approval for doing so. So the result is that you now have to subscribe through iTunes, or stream it on mixcloud. All in all, it’s not what we wanted at first, but in the iTunes version you also get cover art, chapter markers, tracklisting and more. So go subscribe here.

Bring on December, we’re ready for you Santa Claus!

Picture by Flicr user zoomar under a Creative Commons License.

As you may have noticed we have removed the MP3 feed of the podcast. The iTunes feed continues, as good as ever.

This happened after a discussion with one of our cooperating labels. From the beginning we have intended to do the Innotune podcast the right way, so we’ve asked the labels about permission for playing previews of their music in the podcast. It just turns out we have different opinions about what a podcast is.

Podcasting raise legal issues. It’s fundamentally different from the regular broadcast as the podcaster can download the file and do whatever he or she pleases with it. The move of control of the content from the broadcaster to the user, which on demand services like podcasting represents, is hard to get used to for the music business, no matter how short and distorted the music is. However, the EDM record companies has shown to been more liberal than their colleagues in the mainstream music business. We’ve gone directly to the labels in stead of negotiating a deal with any musical rights organisation. And they’ve been cool about our project. Therefore it’s very important for us to communicate in a good way with the labels.

The mentioned discussion has been about us sharing the podcast in MP3 format. Some claimed our podcast was illegal since it was distributed as MP3 in addition to the M4A (AAC encoded) files through iTunes. They were ok about what they called “the podcast”, but not the MP3 feed. In other words, they equal podcasting with iTunes syndication, while syndication of MP3 files with the exact same show is illegal sharing. Our opinion has always been that podcasting is perodically syndication of media files, regardless of filetype.

So, what is podcasting? Let’s have a look at a few definitions. We’ll start with Wikipedia. It isn’t considered a reliable academic source though, but it’s created by the people. Even better!

A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded through web syndication.

… The most common audio file format used is MP3.

Pretty much the way we have practiced it. In fact, even a lot of the feeds at iTunes are MP3 shared through RSS syndication. It’s mostly the enhanced podcasts that are AAC. Here’s the definition of a podcast from PC Mag:

An audio broadcast that has been converted to an MP3 file or other audio file format for playback in a digital music player.

When I did my bachelor paper on how the radio companies adapt to podcasting in 2006, I used a Danish source: Karin Hoegh. She was at the time (and may still be) pretty much the top academic source in Scandinavia on the subject. She wrote about four podcast factors:

It’s on demand. It’s available. It’s syndicated. It’s portable.

Point is, I can’t find any place where a podcast is defined as iTunes syndication only. But nothing of this stuff matters if the heads of the labels see it otherwise. And some of they do. They are in possession of the copyrighted music we want to feature. They make the rules. And we understand their frustration: MP3 has got a bad rumor in the industry. However, it’s mostly about perception.

Apple didn’t invent podcasting. Sure, the iPod made it common and inspired the name, but the pod in podcasting could also stand for Portable On Demand.

I would say there’s no practical difference between the two feeds. The people that want to cut out tunes and share them will manage to do it regardless of the format beeing M4A or MP3. We only play the core of a track (between two and four minutes) and put voice IDs on top anyway.

In addition to the free audio file release via RSS, we also made a direct link to the MP3 file. It was out there anyway and we wanted to make the show as available as possible. But the link to a directly downloadable MP3 made us look like crooks. We did it the same way as for instance Gareth Emery. What is really the difference between a file distributed by RSS, and a file distributed directly from a website?

The bottom line is this: Some of the labels and Innotune see this differently. As the labels are very important to our site and podcast, we decided to shut down the MP3 feed. Even though many of you have downloaded the MP3 file previously, we now hope you want to subscribe to our podcast via iTunes.

There is one positive aspect of this: In our iTunes-podcast you’ll get chapter markers, track names, art related to the tracks, direct links to downloads, and automatically get updated when a new show is ready for download.

We love the music we choose to feature in the podcast, and the Innotune podcast couldn’t live without the support of the labels. After all we want them to make money so they can release more great music. However, we’re not sure if the filetype of our podcast will effect their sales figures in a negative way. Do you?