Dave has begun to come to his senses:
…it all comes back to what I keep saying – do your best work, put it out there, serve the audience you care about well and then let it ride. Worry about your audience, not your ranking. Eventually everyone will realize the bogosity of the latter and if you burn your karma with the former in pursuit of those rankings, you are screwed.
I’d amend this only to say that it doesn’t really matter whether everyone realizes the bogosity. I care what some people think, but I don’t give a rats ass what everyone thinks.
Good god Mark, you are like Jiminy Cricket! You are this hard-ass conscience in my ear at all times.
To the extent I “took leave of my senses”, it was driven by external forces granting authority to the PA ratings. That exerted a gravity that warped the cosmos. Even though I hate the game, I was forced into becoming a playa.
Editor’s note: It’s hard not to be sucked into the hypestorm (or so I’m told, my own podcast being of relatively limited popularity, I don’t have the BBC or USA Today calling me to find out about the future of media), but I’ll just put forth this one last dig. You’ve made a big deal out of “sticking it to the man”, but you are periously close to succumbing to the pressures that made the boys of yesterday turn into “the man” of today. That’s cool, if that’s what you intended to do. If it’s not, it might be worthwhile to take a deep breath and figure out what you are really doing and why you are doing it.
I’ll go back to ragging on Scoble and Winer now.
Mark,
my brother from another mother, please do me one favor. Make your comments an additional one rather than the Editor’s note. This might just be me, but it really makes the conversation weird. It is less like another volley and more like you are “correcting” what I said rather than responding.
As you know, I’ve listened to your show since the beginning. I’ve given your name to reporters as someone that I really like. You disturb me a little the way you seem to correlate your lack of popularity with a higher moral ground. I got that a lot in college radio, when they always fought against doing publicity as “selling out.” Of course, then that meant people busted their ass doing work they were proud of that no one heard because they didn’t know about it.
I think your “man” comments are wildly off base. You may not understand the axis of insertion there. I am gaining listeners and *sales* for bands no one has heard of. That doesn’t work if no one listens to me. Did Melvin Van Peebles give in to the man with Sweetback because he worked the publicity machine? Of course not. There’s a line (FTL anyway) but I’m not anywhere near crossing my own drawing of it. You draw it a mile and a half from where I do.
I dig you, I listen to every episode but I don’t agree with your hairshirt monastic esthetic.
The reason that I often append comments to the end of posts is simply a pragmatic one. For some reason, WordPress insists on having my separately approve comments that are submitted by myself, even though I am logged in as admin. It’s just laziness on my part. I’ve never edited any comments submitted to my blog, and would consider it a breach of ettiquette to do so.
As for my “the man” comment, I’m frankly dismayed by hype-storm which is surrounding podcasting, because it threatens to overshadow what I individually think is its most interesting attribute: the ability for people to produce shows which address topics of interest without the secondary concerns of trying to make it popular enough to draw revenue in the form of advertising. It has become clear to me that is not the purpose of most podcasters. If I act as a voice in the wilderness in trying to promote a different way of thinking about podcasting, then the only way that could possibly matter is if people begin to think that the ideas that I try to put forth are reasonable. Time will sort that out, and I’m perfectly willing to be shown to be wrong.
I do this for fun. Any additional *sales* for anyone else are purely accidental, and that is by design. As sombody once said, the flower boxes in front of your house don’t have a business plan. My podcast doesn’t need one, and trying to make it have one destroys the real purpose of it.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
I didn’t think you were editing them, but the response as editor note just tilts the authority scale. Rather than two characters in a play talking, one of us is talking to the narrator.
I don’t get how you think that anyone who does anything in the direction of popularity subtracts from anything else? Does the existence of commercial radio reduce the value of public radio? To me, part of the value is that we can do all these things simultaneously. I’m pushing artists and trying to help get more money into the pockets of people who can use it and might record more albums if they did better on them. That’s part of my agenda, sure. How does that subtract from you doing that thing without such an agenda? You do your thing, it’s highly cool. I do my thing, it’s highly cool. Your dismay with the other edge seems perilously close to moralizing. It’s not so much that you want your way out there, you want the other way to not exist.
I do this for fun too. If it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t do it. I also accept sponsorships. I sell t-shirts. Every time I do, the Gentle Readers make a few bucks. I can’t describe to you how much joy it gives me to order another case of CDs from one of my favorite bands, one that is woefully underappreciated and with undeservedly small sales. That too is a shitload of fun.
Your flower box has no business plan, but from there you are arguing that the existence of nurseries destroys its value. I don’t believe that. It’s value is what it is, regardless what else in the world happens. By your belief otherwise, you demean the beauty of something that is fine in and of itself. Who cares what commercial uses podcasting is turned to? Your show is always what it is, and is great for just that reason. Do it, have fun, and I’ll be listening until the day you decide to stop.