Voxmedia Wire

Apple CEO Steve Jobs delivered the keynote address at the company’s WorldWide Developers Conference today. Here is a transcript of the portion of his presentation relating to iPods, iTunes, and podcasting, courtesy Voxmedia.org:

“Now I’d like to give you an update on the iPod and our music efforts. You know, the iPod has really entered popular culture in America. You know that when you’re lucky enough to get on the cover of the New Yorker. So we were thrilled with that. And that’s reflected in iPod sales. This is the cumulative iPods sold, and at the end of last quarter, the end of March, we sold about 60 million iPods. And that’s also reflected in the ipod’s market share — of all types of MP3 players, including flash and hard drive, everything, 76 percent market share. So we’re thrilled with that.

Now, as you know, iTunes goes with the iPod. And we just recently crossed 430 million songs sold and downloaded in iTunes. We’re thrilled with this, and this is again reflected in iTunes market share. We’ve gotten a lot of competition over the last nine months, and what’s happened? Our market share has gone up, it’s now 82 percent in the month of May.

And we recently announced something new for iTunes and iPod and it’s called podcasting. As you know, the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now, and podcasting of course is a concatenation of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcasting.’ And what is podcasting? It’s been described a lot of different ways. One way has been “TiVo for radio” — you can download radio shows and listen to them on your computer or put them on your iPod anytime you want, so it’s just like television programs on Tivo, so that’s true. Another way it’s been described is “Wayne’s World for radio,” which means that anyone, without much capital investment, can make a podcast, put it on a server, and get a worldwide audience for their radio show, and that’s true too.

We see it as the hottest thing going in radio, hotter than anything else in radio. And as you know what podcasting is, is that you can not only download radio shows and listen to them, you can subscribe to them, so that every time there’s a new episode it automatically gets downloaded to your computer, you can listen to it there, or it automatically gets sent to your iPod the next time you dock your iPod, so it’s very very exciting.

And there are over 8,000 podcasts now, and this is growing really really fast, so that’s pretty exciting. Now, it’s not just amateurs doing these things, these 8,000 are not just amateurs. The pros have realized that this is huge, and here is just a list of some of the companies doing podcasts now. All the major radio broadcasters, the network broadcasters, major magazines, major newspapers, even major companies like Disney and Proctor and Gamble and Ford and General Motors, so it’s pretty exciting.

And so what we’re doing is we’re going to make this even easier, because you’re not going to have to go download other applications and get all sorts of stuff together to make this happen. We’re going to build it right into iTunes and iPod so you can subscribe to any podcast, we’re going to make it really easy… and so right into iTunes, very simple.

But, one of the most important things is how do you find these podcasts? You want people typing URLs into iTunes? Well, they can do that, but we’re also going to build right into the iTunes Music Store a podcast directory, so that we’re going to list thousands of podcast and you’ll be able to click on them download them for free and subscribe to them right in iTunes. I’d just like to give you a quick peek of what this is going to look like.

Let me bring up iTunes here, and I’m going to go to the podcast home page, and this is the podcast directory, and we’re going to list again thousands of podcasts. Let’s just go ahead and listen to one, we can go to one here, this is Adam Curry, he’s one of the inventors of podcastings, and you can listen to his… (”…episode 187!”) So you can listen to an episode here, but it’s much more interesting to subscribe to the podcast, and we’ve now subscribed to Adam Curry’s podcast. let’s flip this up to this podcast thing right in the source list… it’s downloaded the most recent one, if I want to download another one I can push a button I can download one of the older episodes. And I can listen to an episode… (”Daily Source Code episode 187… Something remarkable is happening here. Radio is springing free of the regulated gatekeepers who’ve managed what you can hear since radio was invented. It’s jumping into the hands of anyone at all with something or nothing to say. With $16 million worth of airplane strapped to my ass… transmitters… and the next generation radio content in my ears…”) Okay. So. Let me give you another one. Adam’s great.

This is KCRW. This is a show called ‘The Treatment,’ they’re a public radio station in L.A., so let me go ahead and subscribe to ‘The Treatment,’ and again, here’s another one, let’s go listen to ‘Treatment.’ (”…podcast of ‘The Treatment’ is a production of KCRW in Santa Monica at 89.9FM and webcasting at KCRW.com. From KCRW in Santa Monica this is ‘The Treatment.’”) So you get the idea. these are really cool, some are amateur, and some are pro.

One more I want to just higlight. We’re going to do one ourselves because we have New Music Tuesdays when we put new music on the iTunes Music Store. this is just a test, but you can subscribe to that and get… (”…iTunes New Music Weekly…”) And the nice thing about this one, as we scrub along, you’ll see the artwork changes too. And you can go to different chapters in this thing, you can go right to different chapters. (”Toby Keith is like the god of… keeps reinventing herself…”) So very, very simple, and we think it’s going to basically take podcasting mainstream, to where anyone can do it, and really easy to find these podcasts, really easy to listen to.

So we’re very excited about this, and it’s going to be one more way oin which ipod and the iT DMC are really at the forefront of this stuff, bringing the innovation into the marketplace.”