The Future of Thank You For The Music
Recently I got an email from Apple's Podcast / iTunes team (I have attached their email below)
New Cover Art Requirement
I resized my 300x300 cover-art (created by the ultra talented @radrad) to 1400x1400 px, I hosted my artwork in a public folder in my dropbox. So I just pointed it to the new (and blurrier art-work). I am not a graphics or image expert.
Server Configuration Requirement
Now this is where I got really confused. A short back-story... My podcast "Thank You For The Music" is an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) appreciation podcast. I used to host it on libsyn their a great site. Unfortunately the cost for this hosting was too much for my current financial status. So regrettably I had to close my libsyn account and look for an alternative. So after a month or so I decided to host episodes on archive.org which is FREE, it's not as robust in-terms of metrics and speed of serving up episodes but it is free.
Now after a quick Google search, I found that archive.org DOES NOT support this server configuration requirements that Apple wants implemented for all podcasts.
Doing testing now :
- My podcast is still searchable in the iTunes Store (use: ty4tm to search).
- I can stream or download episodes on iTunes (OSX App)
- I can stream or download episodes on DowncastApp (iOS App)
What To Do?
Right now I am totally confused on what I should do with my show. Everything seems to be working ok for now. Apple's email did not have any info when they would be strictly enforcing these requirements or what would happen upon non or partial compliance of these. I guess I will keep things as is until I get booted off iTunes or hopefully nothing changes and I am still in the store.
Let's set aside the technical aspects of the show and it's future on the iTunes store... The Truth Is In The Numbers
The show, as of this writing has been active for 1 year 8 months and 24 days or 632 days, with a total of 69 episodes (66 live, 3 scheduled) currently at 41,899 downloads of 89 enclosures, so that comes out to an average of each show being downloaded 470 times for FREE (if my math is correct, it's not my strong suite)
To date I have only had 1 donor 9/5/2011 - Mr. Miscellaneous - Philippines - $3.14
All other expenses: hosting, content, software and time spent on this podcast had to come out from my own savings.
This is a passion project, I do this because I love EDM and would like to share it with more people. I do not have the finances to go back to a fully-compliant and commercial hosting service like libsyn, in fact the show had to go on hiatus for a bit because I had no $$ to pay for hosting. (look, libsyn is awesome but I just can't afford it at this time).
The future of this show is definitely uncertain, doing the math on how much time, effort and cash I've plunked down on this project with close to zero returns is really, really, really depressing.
The banked episodes will be released. Whether I will carry on with this show though is another matter that I cannot answer right now.
Thank you for listening, subscribing, rating five stars on iTunes, sharing and of course thank you for reading.
If you'd like to get in touch @bnycastro or @ty4tm on twitter is a good place to start.