Quick Hits: Interviews with Andy Bowers, Alex Da Kid

Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web:

Andy Bowers talks podcasting’s future: Forbes interviewed Andy Bowers, chief content officer of Panoply, about his career trajectory in the podcasting industry.”When I started doing podcasts in 2005, I assumed they were very closely related to radio,” he said. I’ve learned through trial and error that they’re not the same, and not even siblings, but more like cousins.” Bowers traced his own changing ideas about the connections between podcasts and radio, as well as where podcasts will sit in the future media ecosystem.

Alex Da Kid on independent music companies: Universal Music Group recently signed a deal with multi-faceted KIDinaKORNER, the combination record label and marketing agency led by Alexander Grant. Grant, better known by his stage name Alex Da Kid, spoke with Music Business Worldwide about the arrangement. He discussed the impact of streaming on the industry, but also talked about how independent music companies will likely see a boom as more people get creative about the business side. “I think music for a long time has been under-leveraged in a lot of ways,” he said. “The product that we have is so valuable to the world and we are finally figuring out how to monetize it.”

Anna Washenko