A New Era of Podcast Mergers Is Just Beginning | Hacker News Reader

A New Era of Podcast Mergers Is Just Beginning

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40 pointsmarban58 comments

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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

>> "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.

On the other hand, how much of that is actually making it into the mainstream? Although, it's debatable how much of a "mainstream" there even is, any more.

It's speaking with respect to radio. It's why you wonder who is listening to Ed Sheeran and Imagine Dragons but they're somehow so popular.

I think it makes sense to say that all of the music genres that were on the radio in the 90's are pretty much the same genres today. Radio country music in particular has been remarkably stagnant. The names of the artists change, but with a few notable exceptions (Old Town Road front and center), the styling is remarkably unchanged.

There are certainly newer and more innovative country stylings, but radio and Nashville catering to radio hold a very strong, very conservative center.

I 100% agree, any time someone reminisces about the past, take what they say about new music with a grain of salt! But like you said, a lot of innovation is driven online (but absolutely penetrates popular culture), not by local DJs, which is one of the changes the above poster said

> 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.

Spotify's handling of local files in general is pretty lackluster, even in comparison to Apple who you might assume would lock things down heavily. So it makes sense their podcast and audiobook handling has also been disappointing.

Yeah, this is fairly accurate, spotify don't do podcasts. Spotify run a custom audio streaming service that they hoped would kill podcasts (by gaining market share and then fucking people around). Fortunately, the business model looks like it was totally misjudged and they're failing.

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.

What is particularly irksome is that it imploded pretty directly as a result of the Spotify merger.

Yeah, what an embarrassing failure all around. It's hard to imagine what Spotify was even thinking with their strategy there. They paid all of this money for Reply All just to give it away for free, then made all of the tiny little shows exclusives? And started cancelling shows because they had no audience?

I adored Heavyweight, but the moment they went Spotify exclusive, I stopped listening.

I'm the sort of person who will donate to Maximum Fun, and I'd even pay for Heavyweight (e.g. Patreon or some other way that let's me have RSS feeds), but when you wall up your services is when I'll stop listening.

I hope Jonathan Goldstein does some cool stuff for less shitty patrons.

I think co-ops are the right model for podcasts. Maximum Fun got it right. There isn't enough money in podcasting for the quarterly earnings treadmill, but there is enough to keep a roster of niche shows running with the ad buying, fundraising, and cross-promotion power of a large network.

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.

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.

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.

Can you recommend any comedy podcasts? I tried a few improv podcasts which had reasonably good reviews but for my taste, the quality was anywhere between "mildly entertaining" and "I'd rather snack on a big ol' bowl of fire-damaged roof shingles"

Bill Burr’s podcast has been whipping the llamas ass for a long time now.

Check out Tim Dillon’s podcast.

Check out Anything Better if you haven't. It's my favorite podcast even though they don't do it that frequently anymore. It's just two friends trying to make each other laugh and bitch about their wifes, sports, smoking sticks and drinking.

Do you just mean comedic quality or do you mean production quality as well?

Some that I've listened to are good on both fronts (in my opinion): Mission To Zyxx, Dungeons and Daddies, Beef and Dairy Network.

If you specifically like improv then Hey Riddle Riddle is pretty good, and their neighbor Hello from the Magic Tavern. The anchor characters here perform at the Io Theater in chicago.

None of them touch on current events and the tavern's meta narrative is not important so just click anyone that that catches your eye.

I've started listening to the back catalogue (as in like, from 2007) of The Flop House, and I'm enjoying it. I'm not sure what a 'comedy podcast' is exactly, but a bunch of commedians reviewing bad podcasts is alright.

Who Are These Podcasts also does a podcast roast, though the second half of each episode tends to be joking around about burnt-out satellite radio stars (Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, etc) and I have no idea about any of that history so I usually just listen to the first half.

Love The Flop House. I'd also recommend Judge John Hodgman (which is also part of the Maximum Fun network, but if you're in 2007 that hasn't happened yet in the Flop House timeline)

Taste varies, 2 of my favorites right now are The Biggest Problem in the Universe and The Boyscast. There's also The Snow Plow Show which is just a guy who does prank calls. I'm sure a lot of people would find the humor in any or all of these crass, but it's what I enjoy!

Off Book is great if you love musical theatre and/or improv

Cum Town.

Or The Adam Friedland show if you're more center-left leaning.

If I Were You by Jake and Amir was going for a decade I think but just finished. The questions are timeless though so you can easily go back and binge if you want

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 am subscribed to 115 different podcasts but just end up listening to Dear Hank and John episodes on repeat. It’s a sad state of the podcasting world. The only other show I found that was really enjoyable to listen to was Hello Internet (actually one of the first popular podcasts) and it went on indefinite hiatus years ago.

Interview and talk podcasts have always been popular. I'm not sure why that's surprising? It's an established format in all media, and in my experience podcasts aren't bad at it -- certainly much better than TV which these days seems to be universally terrible at it; there are some tradeoffs when compared to written formats.

Individual talk podcasts or episodes tend to be as good or as bad as the people in them. This is also not surprising?

Edit -- here's a somewhat tenuous Top 10 list from 2005, via Web archive via USA Today (of all places) via Wikipedia History of podcasting. A few of them are still going, 18 years later. They're mostly people talking, not radio drama or stone cold journalism:

1. The Dawn and Drew Show, dawnanddrew.com: Married-couple banter.

2. Engadget, engadget.com: Technology news and gadget reviews.

3. Reel Reviews, mwgblog.com: Reviews of current and classic movies.

4. IT Conversations, itconversations.com: Hard-core tech talk.

5. The Daily Source Code, live.curry.com: Adam Curry with podcasting news and the latest shows.

6. Coverville, coverville.com: All about cover songs, the good, the bad and the never-should-have-been-recorded.

7. Free Talk Live, freetalklive.com: Political talk radio with a libertarian perspective.

8. The MacCast, maccast.blogspot.com: All things Macintosh, by and for Mac nuts.

9. The Rock and Roll Geek Show, americanheartbreak.com/movabletype: One fan trails rock's less charted waters.

10. Tracks Up the Tree, upthetree.com: Music show featuring artists whose tunes are available online.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060207133911/https://www.usatod...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting#Wider_no...

This is a great list, because almost all of these are gone. This kind of content could not survive in 2005. Too expensive to distribute and no monetization. Sort of true about all radio, really. But that's what made the podcasts that made it stand out IMO.

The Engadget podcast is basically now just The Verge podcast. Nilay Patel is still on it (and Paul Miller was on it until relatively recently when he was cut during covid times)

> Podcasting started with a mix of radio drama and some really incredible radio journalism—a lost art.

Wasn't the first popular show the Ricky Gervais show? Which -- and I say this as someone who has listened to both the podcast and radio for years on end & on repeat -- is the most pointless drivel there is?

> Podcasts today are fundamentally different from podcasts of yesterday. [...] 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.

I hate to sound like that guy, but when's "yesterday"? First podcast I listened to, and loved, was the Official Lost Podcast from the creators in 2005, which had a structure but was otherwise pretty loose. Engadget podcast was a great listen with a lot of shucking and vibing.

"Incredible radio journalism" podcasts with high production values and presenters reading from scripts are relatively new I think , with Serial really being the first breakout of them. But that's incredibly different from the podcasts that I've been listening to for the past 18 years.

Personally, I listen to the more 'independant' podcasts because I enjoy the hosts and their interactions with each other, more or less regardless of what they're talking about.

I've been listening to podcasts regularly for well over a decade (not quite 20 but since before 2010 at least) and your comment conveys the complete opposite of my experience. I've always disliked over-edited and vulgarized programs like RadioLab. I got into and still listen to podcasts because they are relatively raw and unfiltered, unlike commercial programs. When I look for new programs to pick up, my main red flags are short runtimes, rigid structures, excessive editing (music and sound effects), and hosts that "talk down" to the listeners, which is a feeling that I always have when I give RadioLab a(nother) try.

If anything, I'm starting to feel like podcasts are becoming too fake, commercialized and overproduced lately. Constant ad reads, hosts that don't really seem enthusiastic about what they're talking about, rotating guests who "coincidentally" have something that they want to promote. Most of the shows that I subscribe to have been going on for several years and are independent, but I struggle to find something new that's interesting and doesn't feel like a rehash of another one.

Terrestrial trash talk radio is still around. Morning shows even.

> 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.

I imagine people listen to that calibre of podcast for similar reasons that people passively listened to the radio in the past: They are lonely, or they enjoy having background noise.

Personally, I'm with you. I'd prefer to listen to a truly well done programme or good music -- but to each his own.

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.

It's hard to evaluate your experience without knowing more about you and the podcasts you subscribed to. Can you share more?

In my experience, repeat listening is going to depend on the content and style of the podcast. Some will naturally bring you along while others can't generate great output consistently. The pattern I see is guest participation in the great episodes. Guests can't sustain a podcast unless there is a strong pipeline.

A podcast like Accidental Tech Podcast is consistently great for the fanbase, to the point where they'll pay for unedited versions. There have only been a few guests over the years and it's completely sustained by the creators. The Rest is History is completely sustained by the creators, but guests are regularly included. Sometimes I'm disappointed when they have a guest. CoRecursive depends on guests and has much more variability for me.

If you like this comment, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

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

"advertiser friendly content"

Why aren't producer-owned podcast co-ops more of a thing?

Such co-ops could sell their own ad spots, pool funds to promote network shows, manage a subscription service, pay-out dividends, etc...

Aren't they? Most of the podcasts I listen to seem to be this model (Relay FM, various tabletop podcasts)

They serve the same function, but are they a producer-owned model?

That helps a lot towards acrimonious acquisitions like what happened between Gimlet and Spotify.

https://archive.is/wpEfb

I wonder what level of mergers is optimal and who the winners will be.

Optimal for who? Because I think it's equal and opposite goals.

Not a podcaster. On the one hand, you have network effects, where everyone would be on a podcasting platform because everyone else is. On the other hand, you have the rise and fall of streaming services, where there are so many of them with exclusive rights to IP that it's just neo-cable at this point. Too many podcasting platforms will tire out consumers who want to manage podcasts they like, too few and we get monopoly (monopsony maybe). So maybe there's an "optimal'" number of platforms, 5? 6? that offer choice and variety without being overwhelming and haphazard.

Honestly, I still use a dedicated podcasting app that podcasts can add their RSS feed to. It's so painless, I don't know why it needs to be optimized.

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