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December 17, 2004
Podcast Review: Bandtrax
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3 and a half stars
, I subscribe
, Podcast Review
Format: radio show
Content: independent music and writing
Rating: 
What I'm going to do: listen regularly
Typical Length: 25 - 30 minutes
BandTrax.net is a website based on a great idea for distributing independent works. If you're an independent (read non-RIAA) band (or a writer or comedian), they want to sell your work. You set the price, they'll tack an extra couple of bucks on the top, and away you go. Their podcast is a way to get the word out about the artists that have listed with them. If that sounds like an advertisement to you, I think you're partly right, but I don't think these folks are in this for the money; their promos in the podcast are solely about getting artists to submit their work. In this case that's pretty important - in their current format they'll run out of material fairly quickly if they don't get new material regularly. For the time being they're selecting some music that's not yet for sale on their site to boost the content of their podcast, but my impression is that when they have enough material on the site they'll play primarily that music.
All in all, the quality of the works they're playing in their show is pretty high; I was pleasantly pleased with everything I heard on the show, including the clips from a book read by the author. The music was at least decent in every case, and in some cases very good. The audio quality of the music and the readings was generally pretty good as well, and they played a fairly wide variety of music to boot.
Production values for the BandTrax podcast are fairly high - they've mixed together an intro and outro that sound good, and mix in various external sound effects and clips successfully. Vocal to music balance is good; I can listen to the entire podcast without having to alter the volume on my player. Transitions in and out of the vocals are also well handled. The audio quality of the show as a whole is decent; the vocals are clear and easy to understand. They're encoding at 64Kbps, which seems a little low for a music-focussed podcast, and I think some of the music may suffer for that - I think they should boost that a little, especially seeing as they want people to buy the music heard on the podcast.
As far as my usual rants go, the BandTrax podcast doesn't do so well. The file- and track-naming is a little bit generic; they've included the date of the podcast, but not the name of the podcast channel itsel - "BandTrax" appears no where in either the filename or track title. In their first podcast at least they included the channel name in the Album title, but they stopped doing that (rant). In addition, there's no mention of the length of the included clips or tracks in their podcast (rant).
I'm going to add one more mini-rant to these two this time. Several times throughout their podcasts, I heard Canis Lupus and Chris mention bands that "deserve to be signed". I'd like to see podcasting lead to a completely different model of music distribution that exists totally without reliance on the RIAA as an infrastructure. The RIAA has decided to treat its customers as an owned commodity, and therefore don't deserve our business - I'd like to see us find a way to allow musicians to make a living from their music without the "help" from the RIAA. I think podcasting as a whole, and podcasts and sites like BandTrax are the beginnings of an infrastructure that could enable that.
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Tagged: podcast podcasting review
Posted by cori at December 17, 2004 12:36 PM