On Cloud Nine?

According to the article Only half the story: Radio drama, online audio and transmedia storytelling, Lance Dann argued that there can be many drawbacks along with the pros of radio broadcasting. Some of the advantages he mentioned behind sharing your product on the air waves is that it is highly available for a global audience and one can operate with almost total freedom, but the big drawback can be not getting anything return after investing so much into the publicity of your product. This then lead to SoundCloud being brought up and how it really isn't all that it seems for a person trying to spread their music to a mass audience. 

When it comes to SoundCloud, like with most things, there are both pros and cons. The pros: there are no limits to file sizes, which means that you can upload a lot of data along with your music. Another pro is that you can record anything you want while on the move regardless of your device (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc). But, I believe the biggest perk of all is the option one has to publish your own music wherever you want, that can mean publishing it privately with friends, publicly to certain blogs/sites, or social networks, this allows one to have more control over how they want to publicize their music. The cons: the cost. If one wants to fully invest in SoundCloud and get the full extent of the benefits the site has to offer the price can get pretty hefty. The package with the most perks and advantages for publicizing your music can cost up to $135/year, this includes perks such as unlimited uploads, see which cities your listeners are, and see the web pages and apps your tracks are being played from.

The discussion of SoundCloud is relevant to the article because within the article there is an actual example of how sometimes radio or other music distribution sites like SoundCloud can lead to one investing a lot and not getting a lot in return. Dirk Maggs was quoted in the article when discussing how he had a lot of trouble with distributing his radio drama in attempt to reach this potential global audience and gain a lot of money and notoriety in return. He ended up just spending a lot of time, resources, and money in his attempt only for it to fall through and end up with him not getting a lot in return. The distribution of music or radio dramas on the global scale seems to be a very worrisome industry with few rewards, it seems that if people aren't talking about sports or politics on the radio it isn't really going to be heard like it use to.