The Sitting Duck Collection is borne of an idea by me – Allister Jenks – that came as a result of three years of music podcasting under the name The SittingDuck Podcast. (2006 – 2009.)

Like most music podcasts, The SittingDuck Podcast followed the style of a radio show, where each week a number of songs were played and variously other content or discussion was intermingled. The podcast went through a few major changes of style but still stuck fundamentally to the same principle – a production which was serial and which ‘aged’.

In late 2009 two factors brought about the halt of regular recordings of The SittingDuck Podcast. First, I was getting tired. Not of the music, but of the relentless march of Thursday nights (on which the podcast was very nearly always recorded). My day job began to interfere more in the schedule as well, which accentuated the problem. The second factor was an epiphany.

Tech-commentator John C. Dvorak made a comment on an episode of This Week in Tech (TWiT) that he thought the days of ‘top down’ blogs were numbered, if not over. It struck a chord with me immediately and before long I had re-imagined and re-themed my personal blog to adopt this concept. The blog now keeps certain content on the front page, as other posts are allowed to roll off the bottom. In additon to three ‘featured’ posts, there is also a ‘lead item’ which gets additonal space and a prominent position on the page. These posts are those I wish to keep to the fore as they remain relevant regardless of the passage of time.

Even before stopping regular recording of The SittingDuck Podcast I had been thinking about and discussing the fundamental issues of the ‘radio show’ style when it comes to the goals of most music podcasters. Whilst some of us do try to earn a crust from the medium, we all do it for the love of the music first and foremost. We love listening to the music and we want to share the music with as many other people as we can. There is also an amount of ‘screw the man’ thinking where we thumb our noses at the behemoth record labels and their mass-produced rubbish that passes for ‘popular music’ these days.

One of the first things I realised was that I was playing every song exactly once, except for some ‘recap’ shows about every 50 weeks, and that this would not do very well for the goal. If a listener happened upon the podcast on any given week it would be unlikely they would take the time to go back and listen to tens or hundreds of previous episodes – not because they didn’t want to, but because the mechanisms in place didn’t make that necessarily easy or pleasant. In later episodes of the podcast I repeated some of my more favourite songs. You can see the effect of this on the podcast web site in the artist pages.

The epiphany was to meld the podcast structure issues with the abandoning of ‘top down’ approach. Thus was born the initial concept of The Sitting Duck Collection. You will not see a single date on this web site except in relation to the histories and biographies of featured artists. I have taken the ‘featured’ concept a little further, too. The featured productions (I call them productions now, not podcasts) will change when you refresh the page as they are randomised from a selection larger than you see at once. Likewise the ‘recent additions’ are neither in order, nor necessarily the most recent. I have then provided a couple of ways to look at all of the content, regardless of the age of the recording.

There is still an RSS feed and the content can (and should) still be consumed as a ‘podcast’ in the traditional way. But the content is explicitly designed not to age. As such, I will continue to look at ways of ‘surfacing’ content where it can be more readily seen by site visitors and I shall be reminding listeners that finding more great nusic is as simple as visiting the site. All the audio can be played right on the site without downloading, and there are pictures and more information about the artists. As more content is created, it will show up in the feed for those who subscribe to automatically receive, but this is no longer the primary intent of the exercise. Rather, it is simply a convenience for listeners.

I am also taking the opportunity to structure a lot of the content around a single artist – partly of necessity for the goal and partly because it helps improve the focus for listeners who, after all, are trying to discover new artists they like. With the artist-centric approach comes more detailed information and in some cases, artist participation.

So ends the story of the conception of The Sitting Duck Collection. I hope you enjoy your visits.

– Allister