5 September 2006 8 Comments

I mentioned in Show 081 that I’d make an announcement regarding The Roadhouse in show 082. That announcement, however, is going to depend on those of you who visit the site regularly. You can help us make sure the subject of the announcement is working and ready for broad release.

The Roadhouse continues to evolve and grow. The amount of advertising in each show has increased, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. However, I do understand the concerns many of you have expressed over the past few months about that advertising. Consequently, I’m happy today to announce a solution for those of you who prefer not to hear advertising in the show.

The Beta Roadhouse Premium subscription is now available here. This version of the show is ad-free and encoded at 160 Kbps. Without the ads, there will be addtional cuts in each premium show not found in the ad-supported version. I’m also working hard to provide some additional incentives to subscribe to the premium version, including possible label discounts for music in the show. For now, the first 75 annual subscribers will receive a user@roadhousepodcast.com email address with the familiar and convenient GMail interface, provided by the GMail for Domains program. Other perks will certainly follow in the next few months.

The Roadhouse Premium is a for-pay version of the show, though it’s not intended to be a windfall profit-maker. I’ve kept the pricing very, very low in order to make it easy for you to subscribe. You have a choice of three recurring payment plans: $1.99 per month, $4.99 per quarter or $14.99 per year. For convenience and to keep costs low, we’re accepting payment only through PayPal at this time.

As this is a beta program, I have two other caveats.

First, The program only applies to rss subscriptions at this time. If you regularly download the show directly from the site, you’ll only be able to get the ad-supported version. This is an issue we’ll rectify in the next few months, so please bear with us.

As of Friday, September 8, we’ve added direct download subscription functionality. Subscribe from the same page and receive links to download each premium edition directly.

The other item of note is that the current premium feed extends back to show number 49. Those shows prior to 080 still have advertising. We’ve maintained the archive of previous shows in the feed, though I haven’t edited the advertising. All shows on this feed going forward will be ad-free.

Please feel free to send any technical issues you may have with the new premium feed to support@roadhousepodcast.com. We’re sitting on our inboxes for the next few weeks, so we should be able to get back to you pretty quickly.

Thanks for your ongoing support. I hope you’ll enjoy the ad-free version of The Roadhouse. As always, feel free to leave thoughts or comments here or to send me an email at tony[at]roadhousepodcast.com.