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.
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.
Or The Adam Friedland show if you're more center-left leaning.
Some that I've listened to are good on both fronts (in my opinion): Mission To Zyxx, Dungeons and Daddies, Beef and Dairy Network.
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 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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.