Magnatune is using some great pro-podcasting propaganda at its site to promote music podcasting.

The Podcasting is Selling Music logo parodies a 1980’s campaign by the British Phonograph Industry, Home Taping is Killing Music. Despite the best C30-C60-C90 efforts of home tape-makers, music somehow survived.

Magnatune is a net music label that specializes in Creative-Commons Music. Magnatune was one of the first record labels to embrace podcasting. They specifically grant non-commercial podcasters a waiver to their music without paying any fee to a royalty collection agency.

Update here.

Here’s something that makes you realize that¬†there’s still room for¬†a tremendous amount of growth in podcasting; a high school in California is considering adding podcasting as¬†a new class in its curriculum.

Gary Bissell, a computer science teacher in Atascadero, Calif., is planning a new podcasting class. Bissell came up with the idea for the class, which is subject to approval by the Atascadero school board. Bissell attended a county education seminar that taught him how to podcast, and he was soon a big fan of the technology.

“Public speaking is involved, audio editing, script writing, organization and presentation,” Bissell said. Now that today’s students have been with computers all their lives, Bissell said, schools need to teach more than the basics.

Podcasting students will start with audio segments of several minutes and later move into video during the semester-long class, which will be limited to 25 students. After the students create their podcasts, they will upload them to the school’s Web site for downloading by the general public.

If other high schools follow suit, there could soon be a huge new generation of podcasters.

Pleasant Software is now shipping Ubercaster, its all-in-one podcast creation software. It’s made in Germany, by Germans. And it’s Uber!

Ubercaster is a complete production suite for podcasting on the Mac, offering podcasters tools for podcast preparation, recording, editing and publishing shows. Features include live audio recording, auto ducking, effects, chapters for enhanced podcasts, ID3 tags, album cover art, MP3/AAC/AIFF encoding – and uploading, all within an easy-to-navigate user interface.

One feature alone looks like it could make the app worth the $79.95 purchase price: Ubercaster directly supports recording from Skype, iChat & Gizmo. That’s pretty Uber.

Details are available at the Ubercaster site.

Ubercaster requires a G4, G5 or Intel Mac running OS X 10.4.4 or later.

ZDNet.com reports that Russian anti-virus specialists Kaspersky Lab has discovered what is believed to be the first proof-of-concept virus designed specifically to infect Apple’s iPod devices.

Fortunately, the Podloso virus only works on iPods that have the Linux operating system installed on them. The “virus” isn’t even contagious – you have to manually install it onto a Linux iPod for it to work.

Here’s how the Podloso virus works:

• You install Linux on your iPod.
• You install Podloso onto your Linux iPod.
• You manually launch Podloso.
• It scans for executable .elf files and infects them. Any attempt to launch these files will cause the virus to display a message on the screen which says “You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus.”

While the Podloso virus poses a threat to no one, it’s considered to be a proof-of-concept to demonstrate that the platform is vulnerable. So if you run Linux on your iPod and install random junk that you download from the Internet onto it, consider yourself warned.

EMI has beat Apple to the punch, releasing The Good, The Bad & The Queen, an album by Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn’s latest supergroup as a DRM-free download.

It’s the first EMI album to be offered for legal download in mp3 format, free of copy protection.

For the first time, downloads by EMI artists purchased from any online music store will be playable on any digital music player, including iPods, with no technical restrictions on their use.

Green Fields, the latest single, and the full album, priced £7.99, are now available to download direct from the www.thegoodthebadandthequeen.com.

via Guardian Unlimited Business

Apple has confirmed reports that the iPhone will be released in the United States in June. The company sent an email Tuesday to people who had signed up at the Apple site to receive information about the innovative mobile device:

“Talk to you soon. Thanks for signing up. You’ll be the first to hear the latest about iPhone ‚Äî coming this June. That gives you just enough time to think of ways to break the news to your current phone.”

Though Apple has not made an official announcement, the iPhone is expected to be released June 11. Last week, CNet reported that they learned from a customer service manager at Cingular that Apple’s iPhone is scheduled for release that date.

New options for Apple TV appear to be in the works.

Blogger Eirik Solheim noticed that the Apple Store now shows a “Select your Apple TV” option, though only one option is available. The “Select” option is displayed when you can select from several Apple products.

We haven’t seen any announcement from Apple about this, but it’s obvious that there is a lot of interest in versions with larger hard drives. Apple TV’s 40GB drive is paltry by today’s standards and several options have already emerged for larger drives.

We’d like to see at least a 60GB hard drive and the ability to purchase iTunes content and have it automatically associated with the computer system that Apple TV is configured to mirror.

Microsoft’s Zune system will eventually get DRM-free music, according to Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp, but the company has no time frame for offering songs without copy-protection.

In February of this year, Reindorp called Steve Jobs’ push for the music industry to drop DRM ‚Äúirresponsible, or at the very least na√Øve.‚Äù

“It’s like he’s on top of the mountain making pronouncements,” said Reindorp, “while we’re here on the ground working with the industry to make it happen.”

On Monday of this week, EMI and Apple announced that most of EMI’s catalog of music would soon be available DRM-free through the iTunes store at a premium of 30 cents per song. As a result, Microsoft is in the position of trying to sell new DRM formats when the latest thing in digital music is DRM-free downloads.

“We’ve been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content,” said Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp. Reindorp said he did not have a time frame for when unprotected songs will be added to the store.

“This does open things up a little bit,” Reindorp said. “It potentially makes the competition more on a device-to-device or service-to-service basis. It will force the various services to really innovate.”

via CNET

The 2007 iPod Film Fest is now online. This year, the festival features 25 films from seven countries.

The films are competing in three categories:

• Student Films: These film were created as part of a class or for credit at any high-school or college.
• Indie Films: This category covers any film or music video made independently, without a big studio’s help.
• The Kitchen Sink: This is the category for everything else.

You can view the intro below, or subscribe to the iPod Film Festival podcast by adding this URL to your podcast software:
http://www.theflux.tv/files/fest2007/ipodfest.xml

BusinessWeek is telling podcasters “Don’t Quit Your Day Job“, painting a bleak picture of current prospects for professional indie podcasting. They cite a lack of advertising support and modest growth in listeners.

They also take a look at what it takes for podcasters to turn podcasting into a career:

In the absence of consistent advertising support, indie podcasters have to be inventive. Keith Malley and Chemda Khalili, the couple behind Keith and the Girl, an engaging, sometimes raunchy Howard Stern-like podcast, have cultivated a devoted online audience. (Six fans have already had Keith and the Girl tattoos done.) The show, which has 35,000 daily listeners, is just one part of the brand. Just as important to fans are the online forums and MySpace.com (NWS ) pages where they gather to talk about the show and their lives. As a result of this devotion, the audience last year was willing to snap up about $80,000 worth of T-shirts, key chains, and other merchandise emblazoned with the Keith and the Girl logo, showing a stick figure boy and girl.

It’s an interesting article, but their take on current opportunities in podcasting boils down to this:

• There aren’t a lot of indie podcasters making money at it;
• Those that do make money have to be creative and work hard to be successful.

That doesn’t seem that different to us than any other small business startup – it takes hard work and most small business fail. There are many examples, though, of hard-working, creative podcasters that have turned their hobby into businesses or careers.