Apple iTunes dilemma
Quite a long blog entry from a problem we were having earlier today, click our spoilers link to read the full post.
- If all goes according to plan we will be doing some interviews with a radio station and newspaper tomorrow. We were going to recommend that people that are new to podcasting would go to our site, click the "Subscribe via iTunes" button and everything would be taken care of. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that last night we were totally removed from iTunes. Apple know our email address but have dropped us without contacting us with a reason. The convenience of searching for our show in iTunes no longer yields any results. Where our show once stood in the iTunes Top 100 UK podcasts chart, now stands the network US radio show WDYD's Best of Jim And Randy.
Everything was going so well, all the time and effort we have been putting into making our show was paying off. The fair nature of iTunes basing their charts on the number of subscribers was giving our show the exposure our listeners thought we deserved. In this new level playing field it felt great that two ordinary guys doing something they enjoyed doing could take on the big boys of broadcasting. That was what felt great about podcasting.
A manual cut and paste of the XML RSS url feed is the only way you'll be able to subscribe to our show in future - try explaining that on a radio show to people without any confusion. We are back to the good old days of podcasting, the 'one-click' dream has been shattered.
We wanted to really give Apple the credit it deserves by telling the public that iTunes is the software to download for people getting into podcasting. Its a shame that all these new potential listeners to podcasting won't hear about iTunes software anymore. Some of these people might have gone on to purchase music from iTunes, maybe even an iPod or a computer. But how can we possibly recommend some software that isn't user friendly when it comes to subscribing to our show?
We don't really know what we have done to upset Apple. Perhaps when we recorded the Top Ten Apple Products we didn't mention them enough, maybe giving them only the number 2 position in the Top Ten Cool Brands or number 8 in the Top Ten Best Web sites. When we put the iPod and iBook right at the top of the list of gadgets to have that might have swayed their decision to delete us from their directory without reason. We were under the impression that our show was family friendly, we have never hurt anyone and we have always promoted Apple.
That is our dilemma, we need to know how we should handle it - please use our comments board. We certainly don't want to recommend podcasting to the general public with some obscure method of subscribing, especially when Apple went to all that effort to making the process as easy as possible. But we are not really PR people, maybe we should ask the expert PR people at Apple who deal with these sort of dilemmas all the time? Why don't you try asking them too? Their contact details are found at http://www.apple.com/pr/contacts. We are guessing that Tom Neumayr is the real expert in PR because they've given him the position of Press Contacts Manager for iTunes, so he is bound to be the best person to discuss using iTunes for podcasting. He's bound to have lots of spare time on his hands to talk about why it isn't easy for our listeners to subscribe to our shows any more using their products - especially now that Apple has cleaned all these nasty offensive non-profit making podcasts from their directory he won't need to be dealing with all those complains from concerned parents and record company execs any more.
Top_of_the_Pods_Bike_Prank.wmv
