Pigs at the trough?I did a radio interview with Armin from Zundfunk in Germany on Friday afternoon. We chatted a bit about videocasts and how to make money from podcasts. I get the money question a lot from people and it usually goes something like this: "You've got a lot of subscribers so surely it's time to make some money off them".

Errr no, it's not.

• Reason #1 -  My costs. They are NEGLIGIBLE. I have a Libsyn account that costs me USD$10 a month (6 GBP). I have no other costs. Work pays for my broadband. I can't justify charging people for something that costs me close to nothing to run. Don't listen to those podcasters who moan about their costs because they're actually all using Libsyn.
• Reason #2 - I scour the web for the best free and legal MP3s available (making sure to avoid the Podsafe Music Network). There's an ethical code of conduct that I abide to. That is, don't charge for material that an artist has released for free. It's the Creative Commons rule. it's good karma, simple as that.
• Reason #3 -  I'll lose my listeners. Why should they pay $1 per show when there are 10,000 other shows out there with free content?
• Reason #4 - Tipjars are ugly. There's nothing worse than a podcast with a big ugly tipjar. It makes you look desperate and opportunistic and you all know which podcasts I'm talking about.
• Reason #5 - This world needs more free things.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating that ALL podcasts be free. I can potentially see MTV producing a videocast and charging a nice little fee for it but that's their right. There will be licensing and production costs for them.

Anyways, rant over. Some more news.

• The lovely folks at Speak 'n Spell Music have offered to provide me with music to play on the show. It's great to see a label spotting the potential of music podcasts. Their roster includes The Editors and Four Tet.
• Jeremy from the Fingertips Music Blog has agreed to be the next NYUB guest DJ.
• Pete Tong has got a podcast. 'Pete Tong's Tongcast' and it's undoubtedly gone Pete Tong.
• NYUB will be a founding member of the UK equivalent of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - The Open Rights Group. I'm extremely excited about this and i'm intending to work closely with the group to promote Creative Commons principles in the UK.
• The Highwire are nearing completion of their debut album. Stay tuned.
• Provocative article on how to live without the music industry.
• EFF tells Sony to fuck off.
• Myspace creates it's own label. This is an interesting development. Could this be the end of all that free music? Sod off Murdoch.