A new patent filed recently by Apple may give podcasting a significant and much needed boost.

The patent, known by the incredibly dull title of “Creation, Management, and Delivery of Personalized Media Items”, hints at the future of podcasting and provides insight into how Apple thinks podcasting can be improved.

You may recall only a few years ago podcasting was a grass-roots new media movement practiced and enjoyed by techies and early adopters. But when Apple decided in mid-2005 to include podcasts, both audio and video, in an iTunes directory, it skyrocketed in popularity, although many would argue that it falls short of mainstream acceptance.

Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution Licensed (3.0 US).

This is a guest post by Gerd Leonhard: Music & Media Futurist, author of “Music2.0“, co-author of “The Future of Music”, CEO of Sonific.com, speaker and advisor.

Last week I wrote a response to the now (in)famous Paul McGuinness speech at MIDEM in Cannes. In his otherwise quite misdirected talk, Paul briefly referred to the so-called ‘digital music flat rate’ (Ed. something we’ve been calling a “music tax”) and so I wanted to make sure I specifically address this topic in a separate guest post here at last100.

Paul’s MIDEM speech sadly reflects the current situation: a music industry still run by yesterday’s managers, executives and (mis)leaders that are still obsessed with control, more than with anything else. Many of them (with some notable exceptions) still can’t seem to face the fact that despite a long, hard struggle to desperately (re)gain some kind of control over what people do with their music, the industry has in a most spectacular fashion in fact totally lost control over the distribution of its product. And good riddance: this development is neither new nor does it need to be the cause of doom and gloom. Rather, the bizarre part is that the most popular and widespread uses of music are still not blessed with permission i.e. a LICENSE. 10 years after Napster and still no real progress – this amazing ineptitude of the music industry to actually adapt has now led to a ‘music is free, period’ attitude among the Digital Natives and the Net Generation.

The longer the likes of Paul McGuinness wait to accept the basic fact of control-loss, the less likely they are to survive this shift to a new ecosystem or maybe even prosper in a Music 2.0 world – and the less likely the artists and writers are to get paid anytime soon.

So why would the flat rate for digital music solve the rampant music sharing ‘problem’?