MAG CASTING

The Slattery Media Group employs approximately 60 people. That’s 60 minds, 60 personalities, and 60 different perspectives on how we can potentially achieve our goals, whirring at any one time. Recently, we’ve harnessed this energy with an in-house online ideas forum; staff post ideas relevant to either the way the company runs or on how to create revenue goals.

Since March 2007, when I commenced the role of editing MAG (Music Australia Guide), I’ve wanted to take MAG’s content online in a more meaningful fashion that just more pictures and more text. Not that there’s anything at all wrong with pictures and text per se, but in an ocean of web content that talks about music, we wanted to hear it, see it, and discuss it, while branding MAG and previewing upcoming content. So, I took myself off into a room one day and recorded a demo version, simply using the camera on my laptop to capture video content. One of the more freakishly talented members of our design team added some perfunctory (but perfectly effective) supers and our web team uploaded it to a specific URL only company staff could view. I posted the URL to the ideas forum the next week, and MAGcast was born.

It’s now five episodes old: in that brief period, it’s evolved from me talking incessantly at the camera about new music releases, to a fully fledged mini music TV show on the internet. MAGcast now features news, interviews, a tech segment from our TechMag editor Julia Gaw with various guests, DVD reviews and a music clip to run over the credits. We’ve promoted it only via our tweets on Twitter, in the print version of MAG, and via one-off e-letters to the music industry and to our database subscribers. And in that short time, it’s risen to reside the top 12 video podcasts on the Australian iTunes store! To quote Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody, “from little things, big things grow”.

MAGcast can be seen at musicaustraliaguide.com

You can subscribe to it free via iTunes here.