In his interview on the fantastic podcast The Sound of Young America, Kot states that the music industry was actually one of the primary causes of piracy. The explosion of boy bands and bubblegum pop in the late 1990s was due to the labels' insistence on pouring a huge amount of money into just a few dumbed-down, impersonal, lowest-common-denominator acts, which meant in turn that commercial radio was almost completely garbage. There was little room for genuine weirdo geniuses like, say, Prince or David Bowie, and devoid of good music, the market was bound to react—hence Napster.

Kot goes through the standard points all dedicated pirates know—artists have never made money on record sales, the mp3 revolution encouraged the indie movement and a huge variety of new and exciting acts, the RIAA's insistence on trying to sue piracy out of existence led to the public having absolutely zero guilt about pirating music. But what's nice is Kot's recognition that iTunes, the much-applauded champion of legal music downloads, is still far inferior to pirate options.

I'll toss this out there: I think the dear departed OiNK, an invite-only torrent site that was forcefully shut down in late 2007, was the greatest music distribution service ever created. It was leagues ahead of iTunes: Faster downloads, better mandated sound quality, an incredibly vast library, vibrant forums full of knowledgeable music dorks, and, of course, totally without DRM. Even now that iTunes has abandoned DRM, it can't hold a candle to a service that hasn't even been operational in nearly two years. Record labels seem to have pinned their hopes to iTunes, but Kot stresses that iTunes is far from perfect, and the labels should be busting ass trying to come up with a viable business model that attracts, not polices, customers, and can at least hold pace with the illegal options.

Cue the "screw the RIAA" comments. [The Sound of Young America]

Apple has established that the podcasts can't be bigger than 10 MBytes, which will be fine for most. Still, it looks like this is the closest thing to "live" content iPhone users are going to get.

The App Store looks sightly different, although knowing Apple's graphical interface guidelines, I doubt they will put ugly icons from other apps in the store categories, so these are probably placeholder. [Schimanke via Apple Insider]

As long as there's a network into which you can plug the $99.95 CastGrabber, you can grab your podcasts directly onto the player. All you have to do is set it up beforehand using a PC, and the next time your CastGrabber contacts the internet, it downloads your chosen podcast.

Even though we like its set-and-forget routine, which vaguely reminds us of a TiVo, it seems a bit unlikely that you'd have access to a network but you wouldn't have a PC nearby, but there must be some situations where you might be able to use the CastGrabber. For instance, what if you're a college student in a dorm with internet connections everywhere but you don't have a laptop? [CastGrabber]

As icing on this multi-tiered cake, they also run through their patented Rapid Fire Roundup® of Cool Products they've seen during the week, nailing down the top 10 best representatives of coolness in the fastest three minutes on Sirius Satellite Radio. It all happens tonight (actually, tomorrow morning) at 12:30a.m. Pacific Time on Sirius Stars 102. If you're not staying up that late, listen to the Coolness Roundup podcast here, or catch up on the hottest and most up-to-date gadgetry on Coolness Roundup Daily.

Show Notes [Coolness Roundup]

In this week's episode, we'll be talking about the Goats and Gods of 2006, picking out the great and the not-so-great companies and products from that wild and woolly year of 2006. Plus, we'll have our patented Rapid Fire Roundup® of Cool Products we've seen during the week. Join us tonight on Sirius Stars 102 at 12:30AM Pacific Time on Sirius Satellite Radio, or you can listen to the podcast version of the broadcast here. – Charlie White

Show Site [Coolness Roundup]

Digg Founder Dishes iPhone Specs [via Crave]

So then what happened?

Well, I thought I could have either had iTunes accidentally open, or had my FireFox stuck on some 16-year-old broad's MySpace page. But after closing down all my apps, one by one, I could still hear Bono droning on and on about Jesus or Africa or whatever. Curiouser.

Well, it MUST be FM radio, I reasoned. So I let the song finish, and some guy named John Romano came on and said it was the Best of Los Angeles podcast. WTF? Was my Mac playing podcasts all by itself now? When did I install that firmware update? Luckily it wasn't, since ol' John said the podcast was being streamed live on KYOU San Francisco—some local station I'd never heard of, which was actually an AM station dedicated to open source and podcasts. Mystery solved.

On a similar note, a buddy of mine had a a guitar amp that would only pick up Christian talk radio in a specific venue. Do readers have a similar tale? – Jason Chen

Podcast Home [Johnny Rome]

You can subscribe to the podcast and new episodes will be downloaded automatically. Listen to us in your car, in your boat, or at work. Bitchin'.

Image courtesy Downhillbattle

http://gizmodo.com/assets/gizmodopodcast.xml

For iTunes users who want to get a head start, click the Advanced menu option, then Subscribe to Podcast... and paste in that URL.

We'll be putting up each week's Skypecast to the podcast afterwards. We're just getting started, so let us know if you've got any suggestions.

If we could have a crush on a podcast, we would be totally crushing out right now all over the recently launched ReFrederator, which puts out a classic cartoon every single day. Some of them star the likes of Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse, Daffy Duck, Betty Boop, Porky Pig, Donald Duck and Felix the Cat—ah, the beauty of things returning to the public domain—and others feature fairy tales and musicals.

Each week of cartoons will have a theme, and this first week's is Mother Goose. If ReFrederator takes requests, we here at Gizmodo are selfishly hoping for a best of Fritz Freleng week sometime soon!

ReFrederator [via Pocket-Lint]
ReFrederator on the iTunes Store

To be honest, I don't know which I'm more sick of hearing about, Podcasts or Bird Flu. But I guess the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary didn't want to be alarmist this year and decided to go with "Podcast" as the Word of the Year. Along with Bird Flu, the other runner up was IED (improvised explosive device). Fun.

Podcast is 2005 Word of the Year [Macworld]