Branches

When we last visited our hero, he was living comfortably at his new online home, safely keeping up with the times. But now, a new challenge arises. Will he be crushed by the spectre of… irrelevance?

What does it take to be relevant, as a storyteller, in 2007? I’m not sure Syd was worried about this question as much as I or his kids were. For us, there was one answer that was becoming more and more obvious: Syd needed a podcast.

Over his long career telling stories, Syd has recorded 14 albums, which he sold mostly at festivals and through his online store. Sales had picked up since the site launched, but were still modest. It became obvious to us—and soon to Syd—that there’d be little to lose from releasing all of his tracks for free online. What money Syd would (possibly) lose in album revenue would hopefully be countered by greater exposure, which would lead to more lucrative—and more frequent—commissions and appearances.

And I’m not even sure I’m right about the dip in revenue. As free (cost- and DRM-) as these tracks will be—and they couldn’t be freer—they still can’t be held in your hand like a CD. Or popped into a living room or car stereo. One is often tempted to think of free content being incompatible with sales, especially is one works in the record industry, but one can forget that not everyone has an MP3 player. Or even knows what an MP3 is. In the Venn diagram that maps iPod Owners against People Who Are or May Be Fans of Syd, the crossover area is small enough to make you realize CDs still matter.

I realized this immediately as Syd and I started discussing how all this would be presented on the site. In my mind, it’d be primarily a podcast, with an online archive of all the tracks he’d already released. Syd’s response: “What’s a podcast?” Oh right. Obviously, most of Syd’s audience would have the same reaction. With this in mind, we ended up making the podcast just one option on the page. The main focus was to be the currently featured album, along with a tool that let anyone listen to the track directly on the page.

Meanwhile, I didn’t want to forget the impetus behind this whole endeavor, the podcast. I wanted to bring Syd’s work to a whole new crowd. The phenomenon of podcasting is ascending, and as it does, the potential audience for any new genre of podcast grows, and rapidly. I can’t tell you the raw numbers of people out there who’d be interested in downloading a funny, touching, personal, professionally recorded story every few days, for free, but I’m betting it’s big enough to make it worth it.

We launched a little over a week ago, and so far, things are going well. According to Feedburner, we’re up to 22 subscribers to the podcast. Meanwhile, we’re logging several hundred listens per track, either via the in-line MP3 player or direct download. And that’s with very little promotion. I expect the numbers to only go up from here.

I encourage you to try it out. Listen to a story or two from the site, and if you like it, subscribe to the podcast and tell some friends, especially if they have blogs, or run large, well-endowed non-profits and are looking for commissioned storytelling work. I’ll thank you, Syd will thank you, and who knows, maybe he’ll write a story about you someday.