Before I jump in, I just created a category for my posts called “Half Baked Ideas.” I usually have a random idea a day while aimlessly surfing the web, I wanted use my blog as a forum to share them. Some will be applications, utilities, plugins, and other might be actual product ideas for new OR existing companies.

Only 1/30 deserves some serious thought. While only 1/1000 (if I’m lucky) deserves to be real businesses/products. I just wanted to share my thoughts and have other people pick holes in the ideas so feel free to tear them apart. Lots of times, someone will probably be doing it already, I’ll be interested to know who too. Lastly, I don’t really believe ideas in of themselves are proprietary, it’s in the execution anyways. In an efficient market (with the amount of smart people in the technology industry, its probably is pretty efficient) no one should know any better than anyone else, as a result, ideas will rarely be unique. (execution and strategy are) So I’m not afraid of someone “stealing” these ideas, if not from me you can steal the same exact idea from someone else I actually encourage readers to take the ball and run with it if they want, I’ll be glad to help out anyway I can so please let me know if you are.

So on to today’s random musings. Since Fred is a Podhead, he got me thinking about the implications of podcasting on the music industry.

He writes,

iTunes is going to include a podcast aggregator in the next version, due out this summer. Then everyone with an iPod is going to be able to get podcasts. That’s a lot of people, probably north of 6 million people by now.

(also read this by John Furrier)

Both bounced around in my ahead a little bit before I decided that,

Podcasting is going to be the “Trojan horse” that changes the music industry economics and business model forever.

With Apple essentially acting as publisher (aggregator) for Podcasts of independent producers, it will not be long before the end users leverages that technology to publish music and circumvent traditional publishers like Sony and BMG. Apple can’t do that with music right now, ie let independent musicians distribute music via iTunes, because they need the major publishers for their catalog of music and the major publisher certainly do not want Apple helping out the little guys. Podcasts, seemlingly innocent to the major labels, will not seem like a threat to labels allowing Apple to furtively revamp iTune’s business model. This will allow iTunes to tweak their infrastructure and payment system (like what brightcove is trying to do with video) for direct distribution and royalty remittance. With any “long-tailed” business model, iTune will have critical mass in the head of the tail to successfully funnel revenue to niche podcasting content and eventually music. In the end, bits are bits/audio is audio, podcasts are mp3 files anyways. Labels wont go way but the long tail of the music industry is about to get fatter and longer, siphoning revenue away from the mainstream.

Furthermore, I believe there will be an opportunity for a startup (Odeo?) or an innovative incumbent (Apple? Feedburner?) to create an audio advertising syndication network for podcasts. Ala adwords/adsense but more like “adAudio” or “adSound.” Radio has shown that listeners are somewhat tolerant of inter-temporal interruptions to their music listening experience by advertising. Music or podcast feed aggregators can splice in audio advertising into the MP3 feeds relatively easily. Like adsense, revenue can be remitted to the independent producers themselves.

So ya, podcast is niche within a niche within a niche. But music is not. Technically the difference between music and sound is zero (all audio). Wasn’t Fred listening to a podcast with music embedded in his post? Podcast is the Trojan horse, the music industry watch out.