#BBC Sounds

[sarahthecoat]

fans of sir terry pratchett will want to check out this collection of programs on bbc sounds. i will put the link in the reblog so the post will show up in his tag.

[hldailyupdate]

“I got to meet Harry Styles at the Brits. That was so cool. “So, I’ve never met him before, and I had no idea if he knew who I was, or whatever. I’m going over, I’m walking through the tables, and he - we clock eyes, and he points at me through the crowd, and I was just like, “Okay…” And then he was like, “Come over, come over here!” And I was like, “Okay!” And I go over, and he’s like, “I just love what you do so much.” And he was so nice, and he was like, “I just think you’re one of the best people doing interviews right now.” […] And I was like, “Well, funny you should say that because I think maybe you should come on the show!” “He was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, when the times right.” And I was like, “When the times right, I feel like you’ll be there.””

-Amelia Dimoldenberg on meeting Harry and possibly being interviewed on Chicken Shop Date. (30 June 2023)

via BBC Sounds

[juliette-tango]

The Radio adaptation of Good Omens in on BBC radio 4 extra this week. It has two delightful cameos of Terry and Neil, playing two police men called, of course, Terry and Neil. It's lovely to hear Terry again. I can't find a way to link to it but it can be found on BBC Sounds and the program page looks like this .

[jimhowickfan1]

[lifedistractions]

Cap mode activated!

[mywingsareonwheels]

Listening to the BBC radio adaptation of Pratchett’s Night Watch (which is great, incidentally, and I will link to below) and fully realising that not only is Vimes an influence on Endeavour’s Fred Thursday (that goes without saying and has been confirmed by Russell Lewis as well as being just obvious once you know both characters pretty well :) ), but a couple of Igor’s lines (ones definitely lifted from the book) are suspiciously close to the sorts of things Max says. I mean “I find that when I’ve got someone on the slab and had, you know, a rummage around...”... (We are talking about the young Igor working for the Watch, after all, and he’s pretty much a pathologist...) Russell Lewis, you are a beautiful Pratchett-obsessed weirdo. ;-)

Here’s that link. Not all the episodes are up yet, but the first three are. The first episode’s only up until 16th May 2023 so be warned... https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b010ns42

(Night Watch is fantastic. It also comes with some content warnings especially for things concerning childbirth and political oppression. Also also it itself is partly an AU of Les Miserables which means that Thursday is based on a (heroic but very cynical) character who is both Javert and Valjean at different points in this story which is PERFECT because of course Roger Allam has played both, one in the musical and the other in the radio adaptation :D ).

[weclassybouquetfun]

He's at it again! Cillian Murphy is back with his radio programme Limited Edition on Radio 6.

Limited Edition was just that - originally slated for 12-weeks when it first aired in 2020. No words if this installment will also be 12 weeks or longer.

He has had several programmes, as well as guest hosting Guy Garvey of Elbow's afternoon slot while Garvey was busy recording.

I love when celebrities have hobbies. It reminds me of how Timothy Olyphant use to call in and report on sports on L.A's Indie 103.1; even calling in while he was in eastern Europe filming HITMAN.

Murphy will next be seen in the film adaptation of Claire Keegan's SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE.

Which also stars Clare Dunne and Ciaran Hinds, who starred in RTE's KIN.

Talk about a stress and rage inducing series. So many characters making the worst decisions.

Maybe before long Cillian will be on-screen with his so Aran, who has made the small jump from theatre to film.

He was in 2020's LOLA.

[brian-in-finance]

Audio 🎧 from BBC Sounds 🔊 ON

Caitríona Balfe, from Outlander, is married to an amazing fella called Tony McGill, who’s a very good pal of mine… Now, Tony McGill manages a band you will know called The Fratellis… So that’s what links Outlander to great music, Lauren Lyle, and me today”. — Gordon Smart

Twitter

Remember… Caitríona Balfe is married to an amazing fella called Tony McGill. — Gordon Smart, BBC

Brian’s Notes: The interview is on Patrick Kielty’s show, but stand-in Gordon Smart conducts the interview. Gordon is a Scot, married to a Scot. Tony was never The Fratellis’ producer. He is currently one of the band’s managers. Lauren did not mention Caitríona prior to Gordon’s anecdote. Lauren did respond to the anecdote. #FactsAreFun

[awomanindeniall]

"Do you and 1D have a whole lotta history?

Join Maddie Grace Jepson for new BBC Radio 1 podcast One Direction: A Fan Story on @BBCSounds and take an in-depth look at the impact the boyband and their millions of fans had on cultural history."

More ➡️ bbc.in/3G8RCIQ

[sarahthecoat]

also on bbc sounds, there is an audio version of macbeth from april 2022, in two parts, with david tennant in the title role. a nice consolation for those of us who will not get to see the stage show he's in now. again i will put the link in the reblog.

[itsallmadonnasfault]

Radio 2 Celebrates Madonna

Michelle Visage: My Queen - Madonna

Released On: 26 Dec 2023

This is the show Michelle Visage has wanted to make her entire life; an hour devoted to her queen, Madonna. Michelle will detail when her love for Madonna started, taking us back to the early days of Madonna in the New York clubs before taking us on a journey over the decades celebrating the music, the videos, the tours, the films, the style, the costumes, the interviews, the statements, the defiance, all of which have made Madonna one of the most celebrated and most-talked about women of the modern age, the biggest-selling female artist in history and – above all – Michelle’s idol. This is a personal and heartfelt love letter to the woman who changed her life - and the world - which doesn't shy away from discussing some of the most controversial aspects of Madonna’s ground breaking career. Packed with classic hits, live performances, archive interviews and news reports, this show will remind you just why Madonna is – and always will be – The Queen of Pop.

[patcaps]

Inside… Ghosts (BBC Sounds, 2022)

Podcast hosted by Nathan Bryon for weekly discussions on Ghosts Series 4, featuring the cast as guests. All 8 episodes of the podcast (plus Ghosts Series 1-4 + DVD bonus features) are available on my Ghosts Google Drive:

[doctorwhogirlie]

✨️ Listening to Marco Polo on bbc sounds ✨️

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasts are hearteningly enshittification resistant

In the enshittification cycle, a platform lures in users by giving them a good deal at first, then it lures in business mers (advertisers, sellers, performers) by shifting the surplus from users to them; finally, it takes all the surplus for itself, turning the whole thing into a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

When a company is neither disciplined by competition nor by regulation, enshittification inevitably ensues. If a user or business customer can’t jump ship — because of lock-in, high switching costs or network effects — then companies are powerfully tempted to mistreat them — not out of sadism, but instead to harvest their surplus and goose the company’s profits.

Half the results on the first five screens of an Amazon search result are ads. Amazon’s business customers spend $31b/year on payola, bidding to be at the top of Amazon’s search results: the top results aren’t the best matches to your search, they’re the matches that are most profitable for Amazon.

But out of the remaining half, many of the results are Amazon’s lookalike products: Amazon coerces sellers into shipping via Amazon warehouses (otherwise their products won’t be Prime eligible), and this not only lets Amazon extract 45%+ out of every sale in junk fees, it also lets them see the bills-of-lading that identify the manufacturers of products, whom Amazon can approach to make a knock-off.

These Amazon house-brand copycat products are cheaper than the original, because Amazon doesn’t charge itself >45% fees. It can allocate some of the surplus to shoppers — offering a discount on the price the OEM has had to inflate to cover Amazon’s fees — but keep the majority for its shareholders.

This is enshittification: Amazon is a place where buyers hold the sellers hostage (because Amazon is where all the buyers are, and the buyers are prepaying for shipping a year at a time via Prime), but the buyers can’t leave either, because all the sellers are at Amazon. The sellers don’t want to be on Amazon, but all the buyers are there, so…

Hypothetically there’s another way to discipline Amazon’s appetites as it gorges itself on all of us, buyer or seller: regulation. Much of Amazon’s conduct falls under the broad terms “unfair and deceptive,” which the FTC has broad authority to prohibit and punish under Section 5 of the FTC Act.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The FTC is undergoing a renaissance under Lina Khan, its most effective chair in forty years, and she is aggressively wielding her Section 5 powers to hold corporations to account, but the FTC has two generations’ worth of policy debt to pay down, and enshittification is everywhere, so Amazon and other firms generally behave as though there was no threat of regulatory punishment for even the most egregious conduct. They don’t have to outrun Lina Khan, they just have to outrun all the other firms she has in her crosshairs.

Corporations, unfettered by competition or regulation, are free to pursue enshittification to the bitter end: once they have their users locked in, they use them as bait to lure in business customers, and once they are locked in, they can grab all the value for themselves, surfing the line between “so useless everyone quits” and “just useful enough that everyone keeps holding each other hostage.”

Enshittification is a dangerous strategy, and not just because that’s a hard wave to surf. Woe betide a platform that enshittifies prematurely, before its users or business customers are too locked in to simply say, “fuck this, I’m out of here.” That’s an expensive mistake, one that can cost a company all the consumer and supplier subsidies it bought with its shareholders’ cash.

It’s a mistake that Spotify just made, when it pursued its podcast exclusivity strategy, blowing more than a billion dollars buying up podcasts and then locking them up inside Spotify’s walled garden, unreachable unless you use Spotify’s client — other podcatchers need not apply:

https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/spotify-podcast-revenue-loss-2022-1235288180/

It’s easy to see why Spotify liked this idea. Real podcasts are as open as you could want — encoded in the open MP3 standard, distributed over the open RSS standard — and can be subscribed to and played back by any client. There’s no practical way to spy on podcast listeners, nor to enshittify their experience in other ways, say, by blocking ad-skipping.

For eshittification-thirsty corporate sociopaths, this user-centric openness is a bug, not a feature. Apple was the first company to try to enclose podcasts, but while it dominated the sector, it never controlled it fully, not least because anyone could leave Apple’s walled garden and subscribe to the same podcasts using another client with just a couple clicks. Competition disciplines companies.

Disciplined by competition and the ease of user switching, the podcast-encloser brigade have proceeded with caution — even where they publish their own podcasts, they haven’t tried to make them exclusive to their walled gardens, instead offering real podcast feeds that anyone could subscribe to. One notable — and shameful — exception is the BBC, which has abandoned its leadership on open standards and open protocols and moved its flagship podcasts inside its proprietary BBC Sounds app, presumably because this will help it commericalize its offerings for non-license-fee-payers (part of the long transformation of the BBC from a Public Service Broadcaster focused on Reithian values to a glorified streaming service for Americans, a transformation that started when the BBC killed the Creative Archive in favor of the Iplayer).

Where others were cautious, Spotify was reckless. It bought popular podcasts and podcast networks, then severely enshittified their programs by locking them inside Spotify’s walled garden. Audience numbers plummeted, demoralizing podcast creators who were uninterested in the future date when Spotify and its Magic Underpants Gnomes would figure out how to wring more money out of the tiny cohort that stuck around.

Today, podcast advertising rates are falling off a cliff. Short on users and ad dollars, Spotify’s enshittification plan is looking like a self-inflicted wound. Even the Obamas cancelled their deal and switched to Audible, a monopolist that leads the world in enshittification but who had the good sense not to make its podcasts platform-exclusive:

https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/obamas-audible-deal-spotify-1235299775/

Writing in Variety, Tyler Aquilina pens a eulogy for podcast exclusivity, quoting Parcast Union and Gimlet Union, the unions for Spotify acquisitions Gimlet and Parcast: “[exlusives] caused a steep drop in listeners — as high as three quarters of the audience for some shows.”

https://variety.com/vip/podcast-exclusivity-is-quickly-becoming-an-outdated-strategy-1235495652/

That is a hell of a rush for the exits. What’s more, podcasts that leave Spotify’s walled garden — after their exclusive deals expire — gain listeners (though not as many as they lost).

Podcasting is an open technology built out of open technologies. We have damned few of those left. The openness of podcasts once allowed wild experimentation, with new kinds of audio made by new kinds of creators finding new kinds of audiences.

The drive to enshittify, unfettered by regulation or competition, has allowed many of the world’s largest, stupidest tech companies to unhinge their jaws and tempt podcast makers and listeners to traipse blithely onto their slathering tongues. They were always going to snap their jaws shut eventually — just because Spotify lacked the executive function to wait for a fully ripened enshittification before biting down, it doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods.

[Image ID: A scary abandoned room. The back wall is stained with the Spotify podcast selection screen. In the center of the room is an oversized mousetrap, baited with the Spotify logo.]

[jbaileyfansite]

BBCradio2: Available now on BBC Sounds, The Showstopper, the story of how HIV/Aids impacted the theatre community and how it, in turn, supported those affected. Presented by actor Jonathan Bailey. 🧡

Listen here

[invisibleicewands]

Today Advent Calendar: 19th December (2015)