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First the iPod took over campus. After that, the podcast was inevitable.

“It’s the equivalent of TiVo for radio,” said Greg Katz, a fourth-year philosophy student and general manager for UCLA’s own campus station, UCLAradio.com. “It’s taken radio out of people’s cars – now people are listening to the content on their laptops or iPods.”

The new wave in music and the potential future of radio, podcasting is leading the digital revolution at UCLA and beyond. Podcasts – generally a free, downloadable audio or video file offered via Internet syndication that can be anything from sports talk to a song compilation – range from the professional to do-it-yourself home recordings, with new shows popping up every day.

While anyone can host a podcast, many are offered through Apple’s iTunes, which has a variety of stations and file downloads organized by chapter.

Subscription is free, and you can upload “episodes” onto your iPod or other digital player with the ease of burning a CD. Popular podcasts on iTunes range from IndieFeed, which gives away one free song a day, to live news feeds and even learning French for beginners.

More locally, UCLAradio.com is well on its way to having its own podcast, which will feature sports coverage, news features and live in-studio performances. It will be taking off within the first few weeks of fall quarter, according to Katz.

“I think UCLA students would be interested in it,” he said. “With the amount of convenience and control it lends to the listener, it seems to be the way radio is going.”

In addition, many reputable national music publications produce their own podcast. Paste, a music arts and culture magazine, has, among others, a weekly podcast called the “Paste Culture Club” which supplements the CD and DVD compilations the magazine already releases.

“Podcasts are definitely the wave of the future. We had so many artists wanting to play for us that we figured to give them a place to publish,” said Allie Goolrick, producer for Paste’s podcasts. “Now we have a really sound listener base, 6,000 and more. (The) idea behind it was for everyone to get to know our editors on a different basis: by voice and by their own personal music tastes.”

Though a magazine like Paste is able to get legal clearance for all its podcast materials, it may not be as easy for those ’casting along at home to garner the same permissions. Even for the already-digital UCLAradio.com, repackaging music programs as podcasts may be an issue.

“The first problem is that the vast majority of the content the station runs is pre-recorded music,” said Katz. “If you’re going to podcast, (you need) individual permission from copyright holders. The RIAA might try to double-dip and demand money for songs played on podcasts.”

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, hosting a file under copyright is illegal. However, while large acts such as The Beatles still aren’t even on iTunes, many bands and record labels are ready and willing to hand out permission to students like Jonathan Kerwin, a fourth-year political science and Russian studies student, but more importantly, an MP3 blogger.

Unlike Livejournal and personal Weblogs, MP3 blogs are where fans and journalists alike digitally post their own under-the-radar musical findings on sleek, professional and sometimes advertisement-filled Web sites. Many offer semi-legal music podcasts of their own, and labels such as Matador Records have been supportive of the burgeoning medium.

Kerwin is a co-blogger on Rewriteablecontent.com. The site features indie bands based in or passing through Los Angeles, as well as other music-related content.

Though music is clearly his site’s focus, he sees the diversity of podcasting as a way for his site to expand, as well as avoid potential legal ramifications.

“One of the cool things about blogs is the visual and listening aspect to it and the way a blogger is able to communicate to the reader,” Kerwin said. “I think it would be really interesting to do a video podcast. The possibilities of dealing with podcasts go beyond just music.”