Podcasting is a unique business. It's the talk radio of the internet. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act [1] passed and that allowed ClearChannel to buy every radio station in the country and consolidate it up into a boring homogenous product. No longer were there local DJs promoting bands that would create completely new types of music every decade. All the music genres froze in place and that was that.
Now we have podcasting which is incredibly cheap to run. It's incredibly cheap to host. Anyone can do it. It's even less cancelable than telegram channels. There's no app store. It's an audio file. There are plenty of independent podcast apps that do not go through a cloud provider. It's the greatest use case ever for RSS! It's also deeply intellectual, or stupid, or controversial, but it's a million different things to a million different people. In my opinion, it's as close to the true promise of the internet realized as any media that has come along since the 90s.
> It's even less cancelable than telegram channels. There's no app store. It's an audio file.
This is actually my problem with modern podcasting, or at least Spotify's attempt at it.
As fair as I'm concerned, Spotify does not have podcasts because you cannot give it an RSS feed. They want to redefine what podcasts are so they can be that app store, take their cut, and control what was previous a great open landscape.
>> "All the music genres froze in place and that was that."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're saying music hasn't evolved any since the late 1990s. There is an incredible blending of rap, breakbeats, punk, metal, and rock happening as we speak. And that's just the last few years. Places like Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and Beatport are rich with new kinds of music and new takes on the past. Even Soundcloud is still holding on in its bot takeover era.
1996 was the year before MP3.com. Napster two years later.
For me, the implosion of Gimlet Media was really the signal for the end of the era.
They had a handful of amazing and popular shows. They used the success to plow money and resources into kickstarting other shows. But the other shows were never as good or successful. Eventually you had enough people bitter and resentful about the continued success of the golden gooses that they all ran the company into the ground together.
The barriers of entry to podcasting are too low so it's hard to rise above the noise. First mover advantage and network effects are/were everything.
There are no synergies in podcast mergers. The only point is to try to get big enough to have leverage against advertisers and monopolize buying. It won't work, and after a few years all the mergers will be unwound/go broke, just like every other media merger does. The only successful media merger of our time has been Disney buying up all IP ever, and it has been successful just because it's so limited: get IPs that are known to make money and use them to make money. Every other attempt to get synergy by combining Netscape and AOL with Time with Warner Bros. with GE with NBC etc. has been a failure, and even Disney is relatively failing with Disney+ because they don't actually have enough IP yet to monopolize streaming and jack up prices to a profitable rate.
It is often said that time is a circle. This seems like a return to more corporate-style media, because it's hard to make money when you're constantly discussing edgy or controversial topics.
When Joe Rogan sold out to Spotify, he claimed to retain full editorial freedom, but he ended up removing tons of episodes and the tone of his podcast definitely started to shift.
All endless entertainment mediums start to become plagued by similar problems, when people start running out of ideas and they've explored all the topics in which they're knowledgeable. In TV-land it was common to have people on as guests to promote their work, and podcasts innovated by allowing those guests to have more time to discuss their ideas.
To me, the question to keep an eye out on is not whether huge podcasts end up in the same attraction basin as conventional mass media, but whether it remains possible for someone to practically run a 1000-subscriber podcast, and similarly, whether or not the lower rungs of the ladder remain or if they end up pulled up.
There is certainly no technical reason why it should be hard to run a podcast, and I don't expect the largest podcasting hosts to do anything but push the largest podcasts, but as long as the low end remains an interesting, bubbling froth of anyone who has a modestly interesting opinion about anything and they're still available for anyone to find if they try, I'm not too worried.
The main reason to start a network is to get better deals on advertising, which implies a relatively sophisticated approach driven by the desire to monetize the format not as a lifestyle business, but as a business business. The entry of savvy, business-minded people marked the end of the wild and woolly first era of podcasting.
I'd say the success of true crime as a format (Serial), and the growth of celebrity podcasts characterized the second era. This happened at roughly the same time as bigger, venture-backed networks started forming. There had been networks before, but they were comparatively amateur efforts.
This new wave of mergers is just a continuation of what's been going on for years. It's not a new thing. If anything, the main difference is that instead of podcasts being scooped up by networks, now it's that networks are being scooped up by other networks. That's interesting, but more of an evolution of an ongoing process than the signal that we're entering a new phase.
By the way, I've been listening to podcasts since 2006, and I'm sort of in the slow process of losing interest in them finally. There are still a lot of good ones, but it's kind of become a wasteland of content (for me, to my tastes) in the last few years. They managed to take a fundamentally shaggy, decentralized platform and turn it into a polished, down the middle knock-off of TV and terrestrial radio.
There are literally thousands of podcasts out there that are not polished knock-offs of terrestrial broadcast media. If you aren't finding them you aren't looking very hard.
I'm sorry to say that podcasting's best days are behind us. Podcasts were so great when it was about discovery and sharing. Now podcasts are so heavily corporatised I'm barely able to enjoy them between ads and self promotion.
If you're sticking to the corporate shlock that's promoted on the front "explore" page of every podcast app, sure. If you stick to smaller podcasts that are patreon-backed or have a couple 1-minute ad breaks in the entire 90 minute show, it's fine. I mostly listen to comedy podcasts anyway and they tend to make ad reads entertaining by riffing on them. If it's just someone reading from a script, I'd skip it.
Podcasts today are fundamentally different from podcasts of yesterday. Some of the old ones still exist, but for the most part the industry has been completely transformed. The word means something different now.
Podcasting started with a mix of radio drama and some really incredible radio journalism—a lost art. Podcasting transformed into parasocial background noise. Most top "podcasts" today are just people talking. It's like roundtable discussions with no script, no sound design and often no real production of any kind. As with reality TV, it turns out that's where the money was all along. If it doesn't cost anything to produce then you can create endless hours at zero marginal cost. Why people listen to this stuff I honestly have no idea, but they do.
There are still a few things I find worth listening to and I often find myself going back into the back catalogs of This American Life and Radiolab. But when you think about the "good stuff" you start to realize very quickly why there isn't much of it. Creating an engaging one hour long audio drama that really pulls you in is very expensive. It's hard to do that once, let along every week. It's expensive to produce, time intensive, and then you've got bandwidth costs on top of all of that. Some of the really iconic podcasts took months or even years to make, and they were almost always made at a break even or a loss.
Now you can record two people having some beers for two hours, monetize it, and post it same day. You can do it multiple times a week. Someone else will pay all the bandwidth costs and send you a check.
I maintain that there were never any consistently good podcasts[1]. There were and are many good podcast episodes, however. Because of this I've never really understood the whole "subscribing" deal -- I always end up subscribing to hundreds of podcasts that all had one or two good episodes, but basically almost never have a good episode ever again. It's also been my experience that most people who are especially into one podcast are in a parasocial relationship with the host(s).
1: For the purposes of this argument, I'll say this means >50% good episodes, but even setting the bar at 10% doesn't change much.
I have to say I've become a big fan of Bloomberg's podcasts - the quality of hosts and guests is high, and they use the format well, getting to a greater level of depth on each topic than you get out of most news media.
Odd Lots is fantastic if you're into economics/finance and/or supply chains (they've really moved towards the latter since the pandemic and get great guests - e.g. when the ports were all back up, they had the guy who runs the Port of LA on for an episode). What's Next TBD and The Big Take are both great as well. I just wish they'd get Matt Levine to do a podcast.
Now that some form of natural and somewhat enjoyable entertainment emerges it was only a matter of time before it inevitably became massively commercialized and brought under the big tent of neutered entertainment
[+] [-] narrator|2 years ago|reply
Now we have podcasting which is incredibly cheap to run. It's incredibly cheap to host. Anyone can do it. It's even less cancelable than telegram channels. There's no app store. It's an audio file. There are plenty of independent podcast apps that do not go through a cloud provider. It's the greatest use case ever for RSS! It's also deeply intellectual, or stupid, or controversial, but it's a million different things to a million different people. In my opinion, it's as close to the true promise of the internet realized as any media that has come along since the 90s.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
[+] [-] madeofpalk|2 years ago|reply
This is actually my problem with modern podcasting, or at least Spotify's attempt at it.
As fair as I'm concerned, Spotify does not have podcasts because you cannot give it an RSS feed. They want to redefine what podcasts are so they can be that app store, take their cut, and control what was previous a great open landscape.
[+] [-] Kye|2 years ago|reply
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're saying music hasn't evolved any since the late 1990s. There is an incredible blending of rap, breakbeats, punk, metal, and rock happening as we speak. And that's just the last few years. Places like Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and Beatport are rich with new kinds of music and new takes on the past. Even Soundcloud is still holding on in its bot takeover era.
1996 was the year before MP3.com. Napster two years later.
[+] [-] legitster|2 years ago|reply
They had a handful of amazing and popular shows. They used the success to plow money and resources into kickstarting other shows. But the other shows were never as good or successful. Eventually you had enough people bitter and resentful about the continued success of the golden gooses that they all ran the company into the ground together.
The barriers of entry to podcasting are too low so it's hard to rise above the noise. First mover advantage and network effects are/were everything.
[+] [-] jszymborski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthboundkid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago|reply
When Joe Rogan sold out to Spotify, he claimed to retain full editorial freedom, but he ended up removing tons of episodes and the tone of his podcast definitely started to shift.
All endless entertainment mediums start to become plagued by similar problems, when people start running out of ideas and they've explored all the topics in which they're knowledgeable. In TV-land it was common to have people on as guests to promote their work, and podcasts innovated by allowing those guests to have more time to discuss their ideas.
[+] [-] jerf|2 years ago|reply
There is certainly no technical reason why it should be hard to run a podcast, and I don't expect the largest podcasting hosts to do anything but push the largest podcasts, but as long as the low end remains an interesting, bubbling froth of anyone who has a modestly interesting opinion about anything and they're still available for anyone to find if they try, I'm not too worried.
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
I'd say the success of true crime as a format (Serial), and the growth of celebrity podcasts characterized the second era. This happened at roughly the same time as bigger, venture-backed networks started forming. There had been networks before, but they were comparatively amateur efforts.
This new wave of mergers is just a continuation of what's been going on for years. It's not a new thing. If anything, the main difference is that instead of podcasts being scooped up by networks, now it's that networks are being scooped up by other networks. That's interesting, but more of an evolution of an ongoing process than the signal that we're entering a new phase.
By the way, I've been listening to podcasts since 2006, and I'm sort of in the slow process of losing interest in them finally. There are still a lot of good ones, but it's kind of become a wasteland of content (for me, to my tastes) in the last few years. They managed to take a fundamentally shaggy, decentralized platform and turn it into a polished, down the middle knock-off of TV and terrestrial radio.
[+] [-] idiotsecant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WheatMillington|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themagician|2 years ago|reply
Podcasting started with a mix of radio drama and some really incredible radio journalism—a lost art. Podcasting transformed into parasocial background noise. Most top "podcasts" today are just people talking. It's like roundtable discussions with no script, no sound design and often no real production of any kind. As with reality TV, it turns out that's where the money was all along. If it doesn't cost anything to produce then you can create endless hours at zero marginal cost. Why people listen to this stuff I honestly have no idea, but they do.
There are still a few things I find worth listening to and I often find myself going back into the back catalogs of This American Life and Radiolab. But when you think about the "good stuff" you start to realize very quickly why there isn't much of it. Creating an engaging one hour long audio drama that really pulls you in is very expensive. It's hard to do that once, let along every week. It's expensive to produce, time intensive, and then you've got bandwidth costs on top of all of that. Some of the really iconic podcasts took months or even years to make, and they were almost always made at a break even or a loss.
Now you can record two people having some beers for two hours, monetize it, and post it same day. You can do it multiple times a week. Someone else will pay all the bandwidth costs and send you a check.
[+] [-] dnissley|2 years ago|reply
1: For the purposes of this argument, I'll say this means >50% good episodes, but even setting the bar at 10% doesn't change much.
[+] [-] earthboundkid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idopmstuff|2 years ago|reply
Odd Lots is fantastic if you're into economics/finance and/or supply chains (they've really moved towards the latter since the pandemic and get great guests - e.g. when the ports were all back up, they had the guy who runs the Port of LA on for an episode). What's Next TBD and The Big Take are both great as well. I just wish they'd get Matt Levine to do a podcast.
[+] [-] boredumb|2 years ago|reply
"advertiser friendly content"
[+] [-] jszymborski|2 years ago|reply
Such co-ops could sell their own ad spots, pool funds to promote network shows, manage a subscription service, pay-out dividends, etc...
[+] [-] Macha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnabgib|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CatWChainsaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|2 years ago|reply