Podcasting

The Audio Media Revolution

Martin Spinelli, Lance Dann

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501328664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Radio

Born out of interviews with the producers of some of the most popular and culturally significant podcasts to date ( Welcome to Night Vale, Radiolab, Serial, The Black Tapes, We're Alive, The Heart, The Truth, Lore, Love + Radio, My Dad Wrote a Porno, and others) as well as interviews with executives at some of the most important podcasting institutions and entities (the BBC, Radiotopia, Gimlet Media, Audible.com, Edison Research, Libsyn and others), Podcasting documents a moment of revolutionary change in audio media. The fall of 2014 saw a new iOS from Apple with the first built-in "Podcasts" app, the runaway success of Serial, and podcasting moving out of its geeky ghetto into the cultural mainstream. The creative and cultural dynamism of this moment, which reverberates to this day, is the focus of Podcasting. Using case studies, close analytical listening, quantitative and qualitative analysis, production analysis, as well as audience research, it suggests what podcasting has to contribute to a host of larger media-and-society debates in such fields as: fandom, social media and audience construction; new media and journalistic ethics; intimacy, empathy and media relationships; cultural commitments to narrative and storytelling; the future of new media drama; youth media and the charge of narcissism; and more. Beyond describing what is unique about podcasting among other audio media, this book offers an entry into the new and evolving field of podcasting studies.

1

Introduction: The Audio Media Revolution

There is so much writing about the moment, and reading about the moment, and blogging about the moment, and the metrics, and the business, and the monetization, and the platforms, and the technology, and there seemed to be no discussion of content, barely none . . . . That’s a dangerous place where it is all function, no form.

—Julie Shapiro (2016)

In the summer of 2014 tens of thousands of fans queued outside of theatres across North America and Europe to hear live performances of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. In October of that year, This American Life producer Ira Glass promoted Serial to the roughly three million viewers of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and within four weeks the series could boast four million downloads per episode. In 2016, 3.6 million people were listening to BBC podcasts per month. By 2017 Aaron Mahnke’s home-produced Lore was being serialized by Amazon, My Dad Wrote a Porno was selling out the Sydney Opera House, S-Town was being downloaded ten million times in the first four days of its release, and podcasting had moved out of its geeky ghetto into an international cultural mainstream. But, as executive producer of Radiotopia Julie Shapiro noted, all the buzz around the phenomenon and excitement around the numbers¹ of what some called the “Golden Age”² of podcasting risked eclipsing what was really interesting and important about this moment: namely, that new modes of expression were taking shape and new ways of generating meaning and forming relationships were growing around this emergent medium. Johanna Zorn, long-running executive director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival, echoed this concern in a manifesto for podcasting that included a plea that reviewers outside the rarefied world of public radio take audio’s new Golden Age seriously and recognize podcasting as an art form (2016). This book is, to a significant extent, a positive answer to that call and seeks to describe podcasting as a creative medium distinct from radio, with its own unique modes of not just dissemination but also production, listening, and engagement. While we do not intend to contribute to the popular hype around podcasting, and while we do keep a relatively tight historical focus, this book should not be read as an obituary for podcasting’s revolutionary moment. Instead, we like to think that it holds the door open for creative audio producers who share the thinking of Ellen Horne, former executive producer of Radiolab, then executive producer at Audible.com, that podcasting’s real Golden Age is yet to come (2015).

In the 2005 Radiolab podcast episode called “Space,” the astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson notes that human beings can only detect a mere 4 percent of the matter of the universe. A similar limitation, and the sense of disappointment that comes with it, also marks this book’s study of podcasting. Of the 350,000 podcasts reported to exist (Quah 2017b) it was only physically possible for us to reference a tiny handful in efforts to try to describe larger phenomena and more complex patterns—a bit like our children thinking about the cosmos by looking at the stars they can see framed by a bedroom window. We admit that our attentions were most often drawn to those that burned the brightest. Despite this restriction, it has been possible for us to draw constellation lines around similar projects, to extrapolate some larger observations about podcasting’s distinctive characteristics as a medium, and to use these observations to push and probe some familiar media studies ideas: Our analysis of the editing on Radiolab allows us to talk about new rhetorical techniques for composed audio speech and a postmodern (decidedly podcast) approach to science journalism. Our studies of Welcome to Night Vale, My Dad Wrote a Porno, and Podium.me describe new and distinctive modes of audience engagement while positioning podcasting as not merely dependent on social media, but integrated into it as a new form of social media in and of itself. Our analysis of Serial describes a “New ‘New Journalism’” native to podcasting and can be used to discuss genre formation within emergent media. Our studies of The Black Tapes and The Truth help us define the new form of “podcast drama” as a product of the unique characteristics of the medium. Two Radiotopia podcasts are used to document the particular intimacy of podcast listening and extended possibilities for media-facilitated empathy. And our close production analysis of Blood Culture prompts questions about new media popularity and statistics.

The critical forays supported by these case studies are all organized to make the argument for the distinctiveness of podcasting. While we unavoidably make references to radio and consider the associations between podcasting and radio, we reject the proposition that podcasting is merely an extension of radio and that the language and methodologies of radio studies are, with some tweaking, good enough for podcasting.³ They are not essentially the same thing and they are not separated merely by a distribution technology.⁴ Radio certainly intersects the podcast ecosphere and marks it in many ways—not least of which is the dream of many podcast producers to land what they imagine will be a more secure job in radio (Markman 2012)—but our aim here is to describe the unique qualities of our new medium and the experiences it engenders.

Intentions and process

All of this book’s contributions to an understanding of the podcast revolution are built on our set of interviews with the producers of arguably the most popular, noteworthy, and culturally significant podcasts from this period in audio history. From Abumrad to Zaltzman, we have collected the thoughts of the most accomplished podcast makers (and related professionals) about how their craft and the medium were developing formally, functionally, and aesthetically. Given the depth, complexity, and intensity of their insights, we made their voices and perspectives central to our portrayal of podcasting’s development in this moment of dynamism.

We began this research with fluidity in mind. Rather than starting with a set of fixed (and likely arbitrary) demarcations, the arguments, approaches, sets of case studies, and methodologies we deploy took shape more or less organically. The contents do not borrow much from conceptual categories familiar to radio studies such as format, geography, programming, nationality, or the comparatively more manageable set of listening presets on your car’s receiver.⁵ The book was informed by our previous interests (in media-making practices, aesthetics, rhetoric, poetics, drama, audiences, and transmedia), by conversations with friends, colleagues, and students, and at conferences, and it grew out of our other research and podcast production projects. There are, obviously, large swathes of podcasting that we do not cover—most significantly, we have barely touched on podcasting’s most abundant form, the “chatcast.”⁶ This approach is in keeping with much of the existing critical writing about podcasting as well as its coverage in the popular media. Even as Larry Rosin of Edison Research⁷ reminded us that modest productions can have huge followings, he also suggests that when most people talk about podcasting they are much more likely to have in mind something produced by a virtuoso in Brooklyn than a GarageBand-using amateur in Bolton. Yet while we are admittedly less focused on projects from the deep UGC backstory of podcasting, we certainly do take up some which have evolved out of DIY approaches like Lore and My Dad Wrote a Porno (and even in some ways Serial ⁸ ), as well as podcasts with aspirations for evolution like Podium.me.

Textual analysis of podcasts, being harder to find in other places, is a key feature of this book, and our readings of podcasts here—while not vast in number—are purposefully very granular. Close analytical listenings to episodes from Bronzeville, Serial, Radiolab, The Heart, and Love + Radio detail how particular podcasts are constructed, how they are consumed, what meaning strategies and literary devices they deploy, and to what social and exploratory ends. In addition to these close analytical listenings,⁹ this book also offers detailed production studies that describe the pragmatic and coincidental circumstances that inform and shape the way podcasts are created, recognized, and become models for future productions and subjects of critical study.

Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution has something to offer (we hope) to two audiences: the popular and the scholarly. While taking up podcasts familiar to readers of Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Medium, The Atlantic, and Vulture, it also aspires to the deep dives of more research-based media writing familiar to readers of New Media & Society. We hope we have managed to find a hybrid tone that resonates with a popular enthusiasm (minus some of the boosterism) combined with significant critical insight and broad-ranging theoretical scope (minus some of the conditionality and risk aversion). We have approached our subject not just as academics but also as producers and as listeners. The fact that podcasting is a part of our own everyday lives has inflected our analysis. We have attempted to write in a manner that is conscious of our subjective involvement with the form, while remaining sufficiently detached to adopt a critical attitude. We use accounts of our personal relationship to the medium as reflective tools or as entry points for discussion; these passages should be r ead as asides that color, corroborate, and sometimes question the issues being addressed.

Revolution and other terms

What, exactly, is “revolutionary” about podcasting—a term reputedly coined only to hit a publishing word-count target?¹⁰ Clearly our descriptions of podcasting are laced with words from old and other media: we talk about seasons and episodes, borrow “cast” from broadcasting, and we still edit “tape” (albeit on our computers). Culturally, politically, and socially, it is easy to dismiss podcasting as just another over-hyped and over-sold emergent medium buoyed by egalitarian but ultimately empty rhetoric.¹¹ Podcasts, as some argue (Morris and Patterson 2015), are really just another example of “people-catchers” which aggregate and commodify listeners for producers, advertisers, and corporations; and our devices are little more than consumption facilitators. There has also been appropriate suspicion around the idea of “newness” itself. Bottomley, for example, argues that “there is little about podcasting that is truly new, when the full range of radio’s history and forms are taken into account” (2015: 180). While Lacey, more specifically, invites us to question the novelty of podcasting as offering integrated multimedia experiences (2014: 71). These readings, often powerfully informed by Frankfurt School ideas, force us to keep in mind that podcasting is inextricably intertwined into much larger media, social, and economic systems. Yet, useful and necessary as the work of these critics is, a tone of labored pessimism often dominates which can seem at odds with the perceptions of the producers we interviewed. Part of this problem, if it is a problem, is that our current critical frames of reference (most of them inherited from radio studies) might simply not be a very good fit for podcasting. Too often when looking for a component or a technique that will mark a podcast or podcasting in general as a “success” we refer to old forms.¹² For example, McHugh (2016) is largely supportive of Markman’s suggestion that podcasting will succeed not so much because it is a disruptor of radio but because it “has breathed new life into established, and in some cases largely forgotten tropes and forms” (2015: 241). Conversely, many of our interviewees have lost patience with efforts to make sense of podcasting by listening backward. Abumrad, for example, is exasperated by the fact that his Radiolab is still considered “new” despite having been in production for more than a decade (2016).

It seems reasonable to assume that the simple fact of a person’s age will influence whether that person frames podcasting in terms of radio or is hungry for revolutionary models. Edison Research’s “Infinite Dial” (2017) shows podcast usage as consistently skewed to younger consumers. Podcasting represents a tantalizing opportunity for a new generation to draw a line under all of audio history in order to invent and reinvent, discover and rediscover, audio experiences and relationships on their own diverse terms and in their own diverse ways. Whether we describe that approach as naive or bold, the chance to reimagine drama, journalism, science, philosophy, sex, spirituality, and even humanity, is rare and refreshing and should be seized without apology. Why would Millennial media makers and consumers want to carry 100 years of broadcast history with them into podcasting? Why would we want to transfer 150 years of journalistic rules and codes into podcasting? Why would anyone dutifully accept that baggage? And crucially, we must ask, why should postmodern producers and listeners be burdened by the tired modernist mantra of “make it new”—constantly forced to refer to past work in order to describe their own as “innovative”? Simply put, podcasting is new for many of its producers whether we can trace its history through Bell, Edison, Marconi, Reith, McLeish, Shepherd, and Plowright or not.¹³

With these competing currents in mind, and in order to help chart a straight course to something that might be called “podcast studies,” we offer here a clear and consolidated list of the eleven major podcasting features and concepts that we explore and detail in the rest of the book:

1. Consumption on earbuds encourages an interior and intimate mode of listening. This is qualitatively and conceptually dif...