While doing some data pruning and cleaning up on AmigoFish, I ran across this CBC podcast listing. What I found interesting was this claim from the info about their show. It’s in their RSS feed, which is how the AmigoFish tools found it to import as the description:
CBC Radio 3 Podcast with Grant Lawrence
It launched in June 2005 as one of the world’s first music podcasts and continues to be one of its most popular, with over 4 million episodes downloaded to date. This weekly one-hour show is hosted by Grant Lawrence and features the best in new Canadian rock, pop, hip-hop, singer-songwriters, alt-country, and electronica. If you’re looking for a source of amazing new music, look no further.
There are two big problems with those statements. I’ll try to be polite because we are dealing with Canadians, after all. First, if the show started in June 2005, there is zero chance it was one of the first music podcasts. At that point in time, it could maybe have been the 1000th, if it would be that low. Seriously folks, I was there at the beginning and I know that claim is ridiculous.
Second, if this program has had 200 episodes and an aggregate 4 million downloads (although who knows when that number was inserted as the description), we’re talking about an average per episode of 20K downloads. Even it was at episode 100 that they wrote that copy, we are talking 40k. That is not at all shabby but I don’t think that is reasonable as a claim for one of the “world’s most popular music podcasts.” I haven’t listened to the show, for all I know it is the best thing I’d ever put on my MP3 player. However, the claims made in this description are by inspection not reasonable. Tighten it up, CBC! It’s fine to talk yourself up but you should do it in a more defensibly factual matter.