What’s Behind the Great Podcast Renaissance?
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The shows use something called 'prep burger' which is prerecorded or prewritten comedy bits that multiple stations reuse, such as fake prank calls (real ones are illegal now). They buy access to a database of them and shameless reuse comedy bits with zero originality.
It's like mainstream pop music, the corporations have focus-grouped all the creativity out of the shows and keep everything within the safe confines of control and management. And I won't even get into their obsession for political correctness.
The days of Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony style talk shows are gone. Even XM Satelite radio talk shows have all been neutered.
This is why podcasts are new and interesting. The personailities are free to do and say whatever they want. They dont have management or producers telling them what audiences want to hear. So they create authentic and original content.
But most FM radio has never really been talk radio with NPR stations being the notable exception. On top of that, FM radio's ads (during music) have always made it completely unpalatable for me.
AM radio has had talk radio for a long time, but AM is of extra-low quality at any distance from the transmitter, and often has a certain zoo-like quality of its own.
It's also interesting that about a quarter of the podcasts that I listen to now are NPR/PRI podcasts.
Everything you mentioned is a negative for traditional radio.
Podcasting became "a thing" many years ago, but it's experiencing a 'Renaissance' in 2014, which means that it's "coming back" to put it simply.
What is actually different in 2014 that makes podcasts successful?
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I personally believe it's the success of internet connected mobile devices. Your phone is a true functional replacement for your car radio. Today, you can TRIVIALLY listen to live or prerecorded podcasts.
In 2006 you would have to pre-download everything you wanted to listen to, using a PC or a Laptop. If you wanted to listen to something on a whim, your only choice was radio.
Today, you can see a tweet from someone you follow, tap a link, and listen without any technical knowledge.
Podcasting is no longer the domain of amateurs and the tech savvy. Talk radio is a professional business and the talent from that industry are beginning to start their own podcasts, and sometimes totally leaving FM/AM/satelitte radio behind.
In addition to pro radio hosts, nearly every comedian is also starting their own podcasts. Bill Burr runs one of the best. Hollywood is also adopting podcasts. Kevin Pollack runs a super popular show and is getting big interviews guests such as celebrities like Tom Hanks.
Podcasting is merging with the traditional entertainment industry and branching out from purely simple niche topics. Advertising is paying a lot of attention to podcasting. I heard one radio host gets paid $2 million/yr and he's not even the top podcast on iTunes.
So the difference is it's becoming a general, mainstream entertainment platform.
Why are all of these pros suddenly starting their own? Why is it becoming mainstream now instead of in 2004? Certainly there are some trailblazers in there that through luck or foresight were doing it early, but a lot are doing it because they've seen that the audience is there and it won't be a waste of time.
I agree with the article because it fits my personal experience. I bought a car a year ago with a Bluetooth enabled sound system and almost immediately starting devouring podcasts because of how easy it was.
Sure, the iPod made it easier, but beyond connected cars, which the article suggests, capable software and Wi-Fi (or 3G/4G) on every device means it costs almost no effort. When I first got into podcasting, I had to plug in my iPod to a computer every night to let iTunes handle the transfer, and sometimes even then it didn't work and I would be stuck the whole day without my programming. Now, you can just pick a podcast aggregator and download the latest five episodes of any podcast in a matter of minutes. The fact that it has become so easy is what drives people to switch from listening to their local talk shows to listening what they actually want to hear.
I believe a parallel can be drawn to the threat felt by cable TV now that HBO is offering content to subscribers independent of their cable subscriptions.
Absolutely. Ad rates have fallen and the number of outlets that you can listen to radio in are fading away. Clock radios are being replaced by smartphones, and kitchen radios are something your mother had 15 years ago. Go to Target... Clock radios had 16ft of shelf space in 2004. Today, there are like 8 choices on a single shelf sandwiched between Bluetooth speakers and cordless phones.
AM radio cannot afford local talent or local news. So it's mostly devolved into the crazy political stuff and infomercial style programming. The few stations that make an effort to have local content are often pushing mobile apps for listening more heavily.
Podcasting is growing because we've saturated the population with smartphones, and people are figuring out how to produce a professional sounding show cheap.
Ultimately, people listen to podcasts because they're good.
Everything else, both terrestrial and satellite, seems to be horrible.
On every station, not in every city. There is no radio alternative where I live other than morning zoo shows.
This is a typical indication of aggressive narrowcasting. "Our goal is to increase our percentage of morning zoo listeners by becoming a better morning zoo". Unfortunately the product that is the most popular among zoo listeners is likely abhorrent to the general population. They're going to chase each other all the way down until the few advertisers left won't be able to pay the electric bill, and right up to the bitter end they'll be trumpeting their "percent of total listeners" metrics rather than "total number of listeners" metrics. All I care about is having a bigger slice of the pie, and don't care how much smaller the whole pie gets.
Similar problem with TV, newspapers, magazines...
The Serial podcast is fantastic...I've forgotten the workflow of how to subscribe to podcasts and have them show up in my iPod, so I just go to the homepage (http://serialpodcast.org/) and listen to them individually. This American Life has an excellent iOS app that's worth the $2.99 fee.
The power of the podcast, or of radio in general, is to me, just another example of the captive power of basic, non-interactive narrative forms, something that is too easily lost in the rush to cram doodads into web publishing...I'm not saying non-interactive narrative is always the most ideal way to communicate, but it certainly isn't a weak or lesser way. I think the success of Kindles and of simple publishing sites like Medium also attest to the power of text. Given that narrative power, and the hugely reduced complexity in producing single-media content, it never hurts to go simple if you have a compelling idea or story.
edit: A commenter beat me to this, I was just about to post that the serialpodcast subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/) is the best place on the Internet to discuss Serial, with at least a few of the people involved/related to the events going on to discuss things. It has a respectable size of 3,580 readers...which is not much compared to the biggest reddits, but the number of threads and comments is pretty amazing...and hell, r/journalism is less than 7,000 users.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that reddit, like HN, is a highly-successful discussion forum because of its commitment to a simplified medium (virtually all plaintext)
Medium and friends recognize this. Apps like Talko do too in their own way--taking a basic form like voice and allowing things like asynchronicity.
a few recommended podcasts for others who may want some:
-the podcasts of npr's better shows: this american life, radiolab, the moth, snap judgment, the organist -- by extension, serial, which isnt an npr show but is TAL affiliated
-the radiotopia.fm suite: 99% invisible is the best known, but all of them are top notch imo
-the duckfeed.tv suite: best known for watch out for fireballs, weekly discussions of a different retro video game; all of their shows are videogame oriented, and frankly while i barely play video games at all anymore i enjoy listening to their discussions
-no such thing as a fish: weekly half hour of a group of people quickly rattling off interesting facts
-i don't even own a television: reviews of bad books in discussion format
-the flop house: reviews of bad movies in discussion format
-roderick on the line: conversational comedy podcast
-uhh yeah dude: long-running general comedy podcast
The weird part is that the two mediums got completely and inseparably tangled together in my memory. When I think of a specific This American Life episode I can instantly recall the 3d layout of the level that I happened to be exploring while listening to the episode. And when backtracking later in the game I see the terrain features and the ideas and important parts of the show flood back into my mind.
I find it very strange, and very interesting, too.
It's really fascinating how our brains form strong memories through these auditory and visual associations. It seems like the more interesting the the sources are, the more likely you'll remember it for many years to come.
A few years ago this changed. I now have an app on my phone that auto-downloads the newest episodes of my favourite podcasts in the background. Whenever I want to listen to a podcast, the app will have one available. Additionally, these apps allow me to speed up playback, read through show notes, and skip forward over ad reads or boring sections.
This is very convenient, and only began to exist in the last few years, hence the "new" popularity of podcasts in the last few years. I don't think we need to invoke in-car internet access to explain podcast popularity.
Add that there are numerous exceptional podcasts out there, such as Science Friday, Radio Lab, This American Life, Serial, etc -- it's lovely combination. Plus, most content producers have seemed to have finally gotten over the gimmicky delivery methods like video podcasts. It works when the content lends itself, but this is not common.
I suppose some of it even has to do with the cell/isp network speeds we are all accustomed to now. The thought of streaming or downloading podcasts over a cell network years ago meant frustration and long delays.
The S60 were really nice devices, it's such a shame the UI/UX didn't match the capabilities :|
Personally, I do want to subscribe. I don't want Internet radio, I want podcasts.
That being said, autodownloading is still very useful and essential for me. Without podcasts, my subway commute would be infinitely more boring.
Selecting a stream at a random time midprogram would work very well for content that has no past and no future and no logic or information, like a morning zoo show or a news show or sports coverage. I guess that stuff is called infotainment now.
That wouldn't work very well at all for maybe 90% of current podcast content. If the content were aggressively dumbed down, it might be possible to join in the middle, but then no one would listen to the dumbed down stream given an option of non-dumbed down podcasts.
Maybe another way of phrasing it is its like the difference between tuning into a random webcam at a random comedy sports, vs watching this weeks sitcom episode. The former is likely to be pretty funny but no idea what you'll get, and the latter has at least has an 18 minute long story, if not a longer series based story.
Unfortunately, after Google acquired FeedBurner, they basically left it in the state it was in when they bought it, except that they disabled FeedBurner's API a couple of years ago. With Google's history of closing down projects that aren't part of their main focus (including other RSS-related projects like Google Reader), many are worried that Google will soon close down FeedBurner and leave thousands of podcasters in the dark.
That wouldn't be a problem if there were an easy way to migrate from FeedBurner to another platform. Unfortunately, there is not. If FeedBurner closes down, you will have to change to another RSS url, which means losing all your subscribers. Also, there is no practical way of changing the URL to your podcast's RSS in iTunes, the biggest podcast listening platform.[1]
It is possible to be in control of the RSS URL and still use FeedBurner by redirecting an URL on a domain you own to FeedBurner's RSS feed, but I suspect relatively few people have done that, and doing it after the fact means, again, losing all your subscribers.
[1]: According to Apple, you can report the podcast and get them to change the URL. In my experience, they simply never respond to such requests.
W.r.t. iTunes, Libsyn[1] and others say you just have to add a <itunes:new-feed-url> tag to your current feed to make the change. Is this information outdated?
[1] http://support.libsyn.com/faqs/changing-your-feed-url-in-itu...
Owning your own domain and routing all your stuff (ESPECIALLY email but also anything else associated with your identity) to is so important these days it's hard to understate it.
[1]:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...
What a horrible and evil website! It hijacks the horizontal arrow keys to change articles. Please, web designers, stop hijacking my keys and doing other horrible stuff with JavaScript. The web is for documents, and documents shouldn't change how my browser works.
To me, this seems similar to accidentally swiping left or right causing you to change articles in google's blogger site.
Because we strongly believe that there is a bright future for podcasting a friend and I started Podigee [2]. Our aim is to make publishing a podcast easier and faster so beginners can get an easy start and more experienced podcasters can focus on producing high quality content without worrying about publishing software and infrastructure.
Additionally we support a movement that was started here in Germany called Podlove [3]. They provide open source software like a Wordpress plugin for publishing podcasts and a web player which is currently completely revised (and will be pretty awesome after that). Besides that they also try to establish new standards and promote old ones that are not widely used (like paged feeds). Currently we (I do most of the coding) are working on a new kind of subscribe button [4] which will make subscribing a podcast a lot easier for listeners. We have a lot of podcast client developers on board to support subscribing through the button and we have high hopes that this will push podcasting even further. The button will see an official release in the coming weeks.
Second, 'It also doesn't get any easier than just offering the naked RSS feed.' is also not true. We talked to a lot of people and subscribing to a podcast is a nightmare for people that don't get (and don't want to get) the concept of what an RSS feed is. And copying and pasting links from a webpage to an application is already an obfuscation (and a real pain in the ass on a mobile device) for the 'normal' user, so why not add a more user friendly obfuscation :)
However, the button is an experiment and we'll see if and how people will use it. Until now the feedback from podcasters and listeners is nothing but positive.
If there is a renaissance, it's being created by comedy podcasts. Let's mention:
Jordan Jesse Go!
WTF with Marc Maron
Comedy Bang Bang
You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes
The Nerdist
Doug Loves Movies
Harmontown
And I'm not a huge fan but you have to mention Adam Carolla and Kevin Smith here too.
These are the people who made podcasting more than just convenient radio.
Podcasts are growing up. Access to them is easier than ever before. With mobile phones it’s nearly as easy to listen to podcasts you like as it is to turn on the radio – with the added benefit of being able to better pick and chose and, consequently, get a higher average quality (in respect to your own preferences). Plus, if you don’t happen to drive but are on the go you probably don’t have a radio with you, so podcasts (next to music) are just obvious to listen to.
All that infrastructure that makes access real easy wasn’t there throughout most of the 2000s. It was a kludgy process and you had to be quite active to make it work. (Manual syncing!)
So it’s easier to get podcasts and it’s also quite obvious that spoken audio content is attractive in many situation and with our devices we can make that content actually accessible to us in those situations – so of course podcasts are alive and well. We just expected too much too fast from them.
I still expect a bumpy road ahead, but just like blogs podcasts are here to stay and that’s that. Maybe they will even turn invisible after a while, you know, just another thing to do online (kind of like blogs did?), as normal as can be.
As mentioned earlier, I think the increased prevalence of 4G/LTE wireless speeds have led to this renaissance. Also, it is now much easier to produce and distribute a podcast. The fact that advertisers are willing to shell out $5k for a 30 second ad spot certainly helps encourage the production of quality podcasts. Podcasts also provide an avenue for content delivery to those who are terrible writers, but incredible speakers.
For the HN crowd, I suggest checking out the Startup Podcast by Alex Blumberg of Planet Money fame (http://hearstartup.com). It's a brutally honest, often painful portrayal of a completely inexperienced guy ditching his comfortable life in order to start a podcasting company. Listening to him pitch Chris Sacca will cause you to scream out "WTF!" in sheer frustration. But good for Alex -- he's taking a risk that most only dream about.
Other have already nailed the main points driving adoption: simplified workflow and the desire to fill dead time (driving is mentioned in the article; for me it is cleaning the house.)
I don't think enough is made of the fantastic marketing channel that podcasting is. If you put out a high quality podcast you can get into the ear of your target market every week, and they are even going to seek you out. It's really hard to match this with another channel, IMHO. Blog posts are of course super competitive. There is just a deluge of content and playing the sharing game is hard work, and visitors bounce. Email newsletters perform well but there is no doubt that processing email is a chore for most. Video requires too much active engagement, and is too expensive to produce. Podcasts aren't so popular yet that the market is crowded, listeners hang around for a long time, and they seek out podcasts for fill time in their day, rather than your content having to compete with other tasks that demand more active attention.
Some things that turned me off of Stitcher:
* Includes it's own advertisements on top of the ads already in the podcasts themselves.
* Increasingly difficult to skip past the Stitcher ads and if you want to remove ads you have to pay a monthly fee.
* Can't browse the episodes of a podcast without actively listening to a podcast?
The UI just wasn't that intuitive for me. Part of the problem might have been that I was looking for a "podcast app" and this was more a "radio app" built out of my podcasts. Using something like PocketCasts or OverCast has been a much better experience to me:
* No additional ads.
* No extra monthly fees.
* Easier browsing/control of your podcast episodes.
What am I missing about Stitcher? I could see it being useful for podcast discovery, or for when someone is new to podcasts. I just struggle to understand it's insane popularity over other podcast apps.
The other killer is that they manage the episode refresh check through their servers so it's a single operation for your device to check for new stuff, instead of it having to go out and check (in my case >50) individual sites like other apps.
When you're looking at the list of podcasts, you can long-hold to select (after selecting the first, taps select additional ones). Then you can tap the + icon at the top to add the selected podcasts to your "up next" list.
To manage the Up Next queue, start a podcast playing and get to the view for that episode (it'll be taking the full screen, not the popup of show notes). The icon at the top right that looks like a bulleted list is the one for managing the Up Next queue.
Finally, there isn't a good way to mark a podcast as "unheard" rather than partially played - the workaround is to open the show notes popup by tapping the episode, then tap the icon for marking as heard, then tap it again to mark as unheard.
I've tried about a dozen apps and currently use the mostly inferior, but very flexible Doggcatcher because when you listen to as many podcasts as I do, at 2.5x speed, the manual queue management is unfortunate.
Auto-download + auto-add to playlist for certain podcasts makes it really easy to fire up the playlist without having to think about anything - I use the playlist widget so I jump right into the relevant screen.
It allows Android intents to trigger the downloads, so you can use Tasker/Llama to check for new episodes every time you connect to your car, or every time you get to a Wi-Fi network and start charging, or whatever.
It also has customizable skip buttons, so you can skip forward 15 seconds and back 10 even from the lock screen, for example, depending on your preferences.
It also has streaming and a multitude of other features, but the above are the ones that made me stick with it and stop looking for alternatives.
Also, it's free. 4.5 on the Play store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...
Edited to add: I often donate to support the podcasts I listen to in the hopes of keeping them ad-free.
What I mean is, a podcast is nothing but a regular file served from a web page. That's it.
And yet, by maintaining this false category, the end user is funneled through all manner of ridiculous and frustrating extra steps and wasted time just to ... wait for it ... download a regular file.
Every major media creator that has made their audio content available as a "podcast" makes it near impossible to simply grab the file. This has created a huge amount of confusion among non-tech folks who think some kind of special thing is happening when they click whatever weirdo pseudo-streaming "let's cycle through 8 different 250-character URLs before we feed the data to your browser raw" button ... "what app should I use to listen to this podcast ?" "how do I get this podcast onto my iDevice", etc.
I should be able to fetch/wget any podcast without doing major surgery on a webpage, downloading an intermediate XML file and then wading through it until I see a link.
I already have a video player that works the way I want it to work. Same thing with e-books and audio. (Having an app to manage the library of media is convenient once the collection gets larger, but I'll choose the app myself.)
I just checked all I’m subscribed to and they all just let me download the file, no problem. Subscribing just makes it much more practical and persistent.
There is no need for extra apps, they just make it more convenient.
"Take YouTube videos for example. An MP4 video file is also ..."
By the way, I can't wget a file from rsync.net either :P
I'm not sure what you mean ... the very few binaries that we link to on our support pages are plain old file links that you can wget/fetch/curl.
No, you can't wget files in an rsync filesystem, but we aren't a file hosting site - there's no public usage here. Actually, we do allow plain old ftp access for legacy systems, so technically you can wget/fetch a file in an rsync.net filesystem. We'd recommend you don't, of course...
Almost.
It helps that the app I use kind of makes the entire thing pretty painless.
What worries me though is that several of the podcasts I subscribe to, but haven't gotten around to listening to yet are dead and thus the feeds are dead, and some of the feeds only show the most recent n podcasts, so I'm missing out on lots of the earlier shows.
Podcasts and old radio shows now keep me entertained when I can't watch. I think of them basically like on-demand tv. There's more available than I could possibly ever listen to.
For the topic area I'm interested in, it honestly doesn't matter at all if the show is old.
Sounds fantastic and something I would love to check out.
Here's my list (warning it's long and some may no longer be alive):
- active time babble
- retronauts (there's a run of the show from 1up.com that's dead, and a new run that's in progress)
- 2 dudes and a nes
- all gen games
- ANTIC - the atari 8-bit podcast
- arcade and retro.com
- arcade hunters
- arcade impossible
- arcade outsiders
- arcade repair tips
- arcade tired
- armchair arcade radio
- brokentoken classic arcade
- cactus jacks arcade podcast
- catridge freaks
- chicken lips radio
- completely unnecessary podcast
- factory sealed
- famicom flashbacks
- floppydays vintage computing
- game boy crammer
- gameroom junkies arcade
- gaminghistory101
- genesis gems
- guys games and beer
- hardcore gaming 101
- how I started my own arcade
- insert coin
- jmac's arcade
- knights of the arcade
- last coin at the arcade
- lazy game reviews
- matt chat
- nes podcast
- nintendojo
- no quarter
- one man & his mic
- player one podcast
- radio free nintendo
- retro asylum podcast
- retro computing roundtable
- retro gaming roundup
- retro junkies minies
- retro junkies network
- retro obscura
- retro rejects
- retro rundown's podcast
- retrobits podcast
- retrocollect fm
- retrocore
- retrogaming with racketboy
- retrograde
- retrospin
- sprite castle
- super arcade theater
- super gamer arcade
- tadpog
- ten pence arcade
- the arcade (there's 2 of them)
- the atari 2600 game
- the c64 take-away podcast
- the colecovisions podcast
- the intellivisionaries podcast
- the mustache arcade
- the nes club presents
- pinball blahcade
- retro junkies super show
- the retro league
- retro tech addict's podcast
- retrobits podcast
- tone control
- vgmpire
- watch out for firewallsIn addition to several of these, I listen to The Open Apple Podcast.
Edit: Scratch that - they're already on the list, missed it the first time
This kickstarter, like many of them, has a funding match going on where if they get more than 20,000 backers at any level, one of their corporate sponsors will chip in $25,000.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1748303376/radiotopia-a...
Even if you don't contribute, I think you'll enjoy 99% Invisible.
Since then there have been several dozen podcasts to get started, with a pretty diverse range of topics. Most of the ones I have checked out start out with "I was inspired to start this series after listening to Lars Brownworth/Mike Ducan...."
http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/ (He is dire need of webdev)
History of Byzantium - Nice accent, dude, no sarcasm. About as detailed as the history of rome. Well researched. At the speed he's going I'm not entirely sure he will ever catch up with the present day, at least not in one presenter's lifetime. I exaggerate slightly, he's only spent about one calendar year on the century of the 600s.
When Diplomacy Fails - Pretty good in abstract, extremely good, for a kid (was just a college kid when he started). There is some "kid enthusiasm" which sounds good almost all of the time, although occasionally annoying. A detailed discussion of how the war of "fill in the blank" started. Has a bit of a bias that wars only start between civilized-ish countries when their diplomatic corps and/or cabinet advisors screw up, and he pulls no punches on who screwed up and tends to take sides and explain the facts and why he took a side, which is interesting and I usually end up agreeing. The "informal roundtable with friends" followup episodes are totally skippable. The very long WWI sub-series is well worth every second spent listening to them.
Revolutions. Focus with laser like precision on the causes, events, and outcome of various revolutions. This guy is going places and will be a famous name someday. Can't find much to complain about.
The British History Podcast. A bit more comedic than the others. Where he finds so much source material is a mystery. He's an unemployed (formerly unemployed?) lawyer so he sometimes focuses more than others on judicial / .gov process type stuff, because that's kind of what lawyers do, which is interesting.
The Bulgarian History Podcast - Lots of history in a small country. Flashes between today and back then, more than the competition. His intro music, although appropriate, is a little annoying. Note that the British History Podcast doesn't have medieval British music and its still cool, as a compare and contrast. Its a foreign enough culture to be very interesting.
Dan Carlins Hardcore History - Lower case L libertarian-ish episodic commentary on one event, sometimes across a couple episodes if complicated. If you hate his WWI discussion thats OK just chill till he discusses the Mongol Invasions, its like the weather, if you don't like it today, just wait a month.
Also, you could argue that radio has become even less interesting as a medium in the last decade. Last, a lot of niche celebrities are doing podcasts now, so when you combine those things together, it seems like the makings of an interesting inflection point.
I forget which version of iOS Apple offered a dedicated Podcast app and separated it from their regular music app, but it improved things greatly.
I heard that the team working on the podcasts app was one or two people.
In addition to the higher potential revenues from ads, from the standpoint of the listener, the DVR-like ability to easily skip ads has been built in from the beginning. Similarly, most podcasts have the ads entirely at the beginning or end, making them even easier to ignore (I doubt it will stay this way, though).
I also like the fact that I can download many, many podcasts ahead of time and have a huge library to choose from depending on my mood. The storage costs on modern hardware is negligible.
Lowering costs of high quality audio and editing equipment and software has to be a huge factor.
And let's not forget that a great many (close to all?) podcasts are free!
Even if you don't think you're interested in history, give it a listen because Dan makes it interesting. The current series on World War I has just been completely amazing.
Same with IT Conversations, it started as MP3s in directories and then rode it all the way to a dedicated company (Conversations Network) and SpokenWord.org super aggregator. All gone now.
I've recently built a simple RoR app to display the iTunes Podcast Charts.. http://www.podcastchart.com