8 ms·

Podcasting is just radio now

54 points by thm 4y ago

newsclues 4y ago
YouTube is just TV.
hhmc 4y ago
I don't disagree with the premise of this article, but it's an incredible act of erasure to declare the meaningful start of podcasts to be 2014. There's a rich history in the preceding decade that's completely ignored (and would help explicate what's happened since).
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  It's not hard to see the echo of the web in podcasts: Balkanization and commoditization. I think Econtalk was my first podcast, back in 2007 or so. It was not a crowded space, and the one show I listened to seemed interesting and well-made. More importantly, the guests were not on stop 62 of their 100 podcast marathon, so everything seemed fresher. By comparison, just about every podcast is produced better now than back then (though I doubt the necessity of 100MB file sizes for an hour of talk) and I can listen to 5 separate podcasts that have weekly content, all of which is more tightly tailored to me than my favorite 5 episodes of a year's worth of my favorite show in the old times. But that means there's too much stuff to meander through, plus I'll end up hearing the same person interviewed on all 5 shows. And, advertising everywhere. Most podcasts aren't the handsfree experience they used to be, now that I have to seek past ads every 15 minutes.
  - mark_undoio 4y ago
    > And, advertising everywhere. Most podcasts aren't the handsfree experience they used to be, now that I have to seek past ads every 15 minutes. In some comedy podcasts, I can find the ad reads to be entertaining enough to be worth a listen. In others my heart sinks every time I hear the same pre-recorded ad (that annoyed me the first time) popping up again. Just how bad is it in general? Feels like there's an opportunity for good content in the ad breaks, even on non-silly podcasts - but that requires effort to generate something interesting / useful / fun that's not the same every time. OTOH, for some products it seems like spamming out the same content to build recognition does seem to be a rational (or at least popular!) strategy, which is a shame.
    - causi 4y ago
      Just how bad is it in general? Dynamic ads mean that ads get placed all through the whole show archive whenever they sign a contract. Sucks, right? Almost. The trick is to wait until a show's contract expires and before they've lined up a new one, download the whole show archive so you can enjoy it ad-free.
  - Denvercoder9 4y ago
    > (though I doubt the necessity of 100MB file sizes for an hour of talk) An hour of uncompressed audio at a standard 44.1 kHz sample rate and 16 bit depth is 317 MB. Opinions on what's acceptable compression obviously vary, but I don't think 100 MB is too outrageous.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
    I, too, started listening to Econtalk right around when it came out, and the thing that stuck out to me the most, which seemed so unlike anything I ever came across, was just how long guests were allowed to speak. That seemed... just incredibly novel to me. Russ would think nothing of asking a question and then many minutes going by with the guest answering the question. There was a... slowness? to it, and genuine sense of a curiosity that felt remarkably novel compared to the rest of media that I used to consume. Since then, there's been just an insane proliferation of podcasts along the same line, but I think his pacing is still quite unique, and in many others I get the impression that the host is competing with the guest for attention, whereas with him it feels much more like some guest has been given a platform and I'm sitting there listening to him try to extract as much as he can from them.
black_puppydog 4y ago
My favourite podcasts all started as passion projects, often with a simple headset next to a laptop and no production to speak of. Some keep continuing like that (although typically people get a bit deeper into audio production as time passes) and some go "professional" after a while. The tendency to start out with a studio and crew from the get-go is always a red flag for me, and is indeed quite boring most of the time. What I want is just "two dudes talking" (or dudettes, that's fine too!) about something they're intensely, deeply interested in. Can be sociology, food, coding, whatever. It seems that's hard to set up for a commercial entity, who'd have thought?
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  OTOH, the "two dudes talking" also produces the absolute worst podcast content when they do their small talk on air rather than getting it out of the way first. No podcast audience wants to hear your inside jokes and about how everyone's been making fun of you for your ski injury.
  - dexterdog 4y ago
    I agree, but the success of the Bateman-Arnett-whatshisname podcast would suggest that we are both wrong.
  - cooperadymas 4y ago
    And yet, nearly every popular podcast does this, so maybe the audience actually enjoys it? It's a bit like the story at the top of every recipe on the web. It annoys a certain type of people, but it's also the reason most of the people are there.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      You definitely have a variety of audience expectations and a given person's expectations may even differ by podcast. Some people like virtually hanging out with a lot of idle chit-chat, while others just want maximized information flow through a firehose. Neither is right or wrong and complaining that some information source doesn't match your preferences probably isn't going to get you anywhere.
rossng 4y ago
I was listening to podcasts that were more radio than art long before 2014. Surely that was the origin of the medium, and Serial was notable by its being an exception rather than the rule?
IgorPartola 4y ago
A really good discussion of this I heard recently (on a podcast) talked about how just like in the early days of YouTube people could tell there was potential there but nobody could quite tell how much effort it would take to make money off it and what kind of ROI there was. Then things like Serial (and specific YouTube properties they mentioned like Rocket Jump and VGHS) showed exactly what it took and what could be made from content specifically created for these platforms and now people have more of a blueprint. For example (these are my thoughts now), you can’t release a $300m AAA blockbuster movie directly on YouTube because you will never make your money back. But you can make money off unboxing videos.
christophilus 4y ago
Eh. There’s a podcast for every topic under the sun, and I can listen whenever I want, wherever I want; even offline. Podcasts are like Spotify or Napster or something. They’re a marked improvement over local radio, and by a long shot.
bluedays 4y ago
> Serial’s production company released S-Town, an almost anti-commercial literary-nonfiction project about the remarkable life of an unremarkable man. Yeah fuck this style of journalism. If he was unremarkable he wouldn’t have had a hit podcast made about him. This is an remarkable article written by an remarkable journalist.
- ideamotor 4y ago
  Did you listen to Shit Town?
  - bluedays 4y ago
    Yeah it is one of the best podcasts I’ve ever listened to.
    - ideamotor 4y ago
      Then I was wooshed, thanks for clarifying.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
Zoomers and young millenials can't listen to radio - the word itself is uncool. Re-branding is important. If it's new, it's cool. And everything old is made new again. Functionally, of course there's some differences: podcasts are free from the physical limitations of radio, there's an unlimited number of channels, and anyone can start one. But at their essence, they're the same.
- paulcole 4y ago
  As much fun as it is to dunk on the current younger generations, this isn’t some new phenomenon. Older millennials, Gen-Xers, and Boomers didn’t think what their parents did was cool either.
  - dexterdog 4y ago
    So are boomers really the start of everything wrong with today? What their parents did was actually pretty cool. Or is that just because I'm genx and people always think their grandparents are cooler than their parents?
    - paulcole 4y ago
      We’re all responsible for what’s wrong with today. If not responsible for the cause then responsible for fixing it. Or not. I don’t think it particularly matters either way.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Local radio (especially AM?) has really gone to trash to the point that, if, hypothetically, people started broadcasting over-the-air pirate radio consisting of a curated list of back-to-back podcasts ... I would start sweeping the dial again.
- Bakary 4y ago
  I don't think this condescension is warranted. The functional differences make all the difference. The key part is not the physical limitations of radio but the content that can be played. You can aim content at a niche audience instead of having to play top 40 dad rock and talk about the news. That is the completely new part.
aaron695 4y ago
Is anyone reading the article? It's HN, so no I guess. Podcasts were radio. "Serial" happened and it became a event. Now they are back to radio. If you disagree name the podcast before "Serial" that we all know about? Or something recently. OT: Check out Apple TVs "Calls" for an interesting attempt at an almost entirely audio based TV Show https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9327706/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9327706/
- ghaff 4y ago
  I'm not going to look up all the start dates but quite a few from NPR (e.g. Radio Lab), 99 Percent Invisible, Freakonomics, etc. I agree that Serial became an event for a more mainstream audience but lots of people listened to podcasts before that--especially once smartphones became common.
sschueller 4y ago
Podcasting exited way before 2014. Just check Wikipedia. In fact Steve Jobs talked about it on stage so they were important enough for him, yet he died 2011... Great journalism /s
- ghaff 4y ago
  Podcasting existed back in the early 2000s assuming you define it as RSS audioblogs, e.g. Adam Curry. However, there was definitely a first generation which was in the vein of "Hey, I can do radio all by myself" and the current second generation. I don't know if 2014 is the right date--seems late--but there was definitely a difference in kind once you had automagical syncing on smartphones and a viable market for podcasts paying audio engineers and producers, etc.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    > automagical syncing on smartphones What about the automagical syncing on ipods?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      The only iPod I ever owned I had to plug in to sync. Cellular (and to a lesser degree WiFi) connectivity was a game changer for topical mobile content. The lack of same made things like the Palm Pilot far less useful than they would have otherwise been. For music, it didn't matter so much because people were mostly fine with having some 10s of GB of MP3s that they just updated from time to time.
      - kgwgk 4y ago
        You had to plug in to charge so at least for people working regularly with a computer there was zero additional effort required.
        ghaff 4y ago
        I traveled a lot and didn't necessarily charge daily on my primary computer. I can't say I really remember all the details--and there may well have been factors beyond easy syncing--but I didn't regularly listen to podcasts until I got an iPhone around 2010.
nonameking2026 4y ago
Improved radio, podcasts are great! I do wish we would have another name for "podcasts" that are only on Spotify f.x.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Spoticasts?
  - nonameking2026 4y ago
    Wallcast - things requiring registration in any way.
lekevicius 4y ago
I host a nationwide radio show that we also publish as a podcast. Podcasting is not radio, as much as I'd enjoy that. We are the only show I'm aware of that publishes "show notes", links to things we talk about on the radio, encouraging listeners to check those things out. We are also deeply tied to the schedule: some of my favorite podcasts vary greatly in length, our show is exactly 25 minutes every time, with a reminder "what show you are listening to" around 12 minutes. Radio is still great at having massive, immediate, but highly passive audience. In every other regard, podcasts are so much better.
magic_hamster 4y ago
It was always going to be a sea of shows - the low barrier for entry, basically owning a microphone, means anyone can at least give it a shot. A bunch of friends rambling on Discord and calling that a podcast, is now a common practice. You need a very specific kind of person to produce a podcast worth your while. It needs to be extremely well researched, written for audio, and delivered a certain way. It will never be radio, regardless of the monetization model, because it's not live - which is arguably one of its biggest draws.
gertrunde 4y ago
Maybe I'm odd, but I don't really do podcasts at all. Which is quite frustrating, as there are various technical blogs I've followed over the years, and when some of them transition to a podcast, or a video equivalent, I just stop following. There's probably some useful/interesting information in there, I'm just not interested in suffering through the 40-50% waffle, or worse - meaningless video of a talking head.
- danwee 4y ago
  Same here. Usually in a podcast session of 1h, there is probably around 15 minutes of good content. The rest is just bluff, and with audio is difficult to skip the bluff.
- VLM 4y ago
  That is the exact target the commute time "morning radio show" used to have, but the radio became too lame to listen to, so now there's podcasts capturing the same market. Back when I had a commute, I found it a million times more relaxing to listen to anything OTHER than the technical stuff I was doing at work during my commute. Technical podcasts seemed to fit in pretty well at the gym or doing menial labor (yard work, etc) Audiobooks about contemporary issues that should have been a podcast don't work well; same with podcasts about issues that should have been a permanent audiobook.
- footlose_3815 4y ago
  [dead]
- jcbrand 4y ago
  IMO the way to do it is to make certain tasks a bit more enjoyable. I mainly listen to podcasts when cleaning, washing the dishes, doing the laundry or driving long distances. Compared to the vapid nonsense coming from radio DJs, many podcasters are verifiable geniuses.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    For me, it's mostly driving which, since I haven't commuted in years, means I don't listen a lot. Doing stuff around the house? I would mostly only be half-listening and I don't really care for having background noise on in general when I'm at home. I also mostly don't listen to podcasts for technical content. I get plenty of that during the day.
oxff 4y ago
Only podcast where I felt the information value was high enough to listen to was "Signals & Threads", and even they provide a transcript. You can just put on most Youtube videos to 2x too. It's just such a useless thing, podcasts. Maybe if you have a long commute in public transport so you zone out for the duration.
ramboldio 4y ago
What is "just" radio suppose to mean? Radio is awesome.
- digitalsankhara 4y ago
  I agree. But I'm old and pedantic for whom the word Radio means on-air broadcasting. I love podcasts and often think, wow, these would make awesome broadcasts. Unfortunately, in the UK at least, VHF FM is, in my opinion, commercial drivel. As is Medium Wave (AM) band - same few media companies playing super safe music and content to fill the gaps between ads. The BBC is closing down MW transmitters and syndicating content to the remaining ones (esp. in the evening) thus loosing local community programs and forcing listeners onto DAB or online.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Yes, radio has gone to shit in the U.S. as well.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yeah, gave me pause too. Maybe they mean ubiquitous like radio, mainstream like radio.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tchock23 4y ago
The story/narrative driven style of podcasting may be suffering from a lull, but interview style episodes on niche topics is flourishing.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >interview style episodes on niche topics is flourishing One key reason is that, so long as you're in a position to get interesting guests, a 30 minute interview (which is my preferred target length), given some prep and a reasonable standard of care on the technical aspects--which doesn't need to go crazy on microphones etc.--it's not a huge amount of work to create a good episode. And I never bothered with sponsors etc. It's also pretty cheap and easy to get a transcript made.
  - tchock23 4y ago
    Agreed. It is flourishing largely as a function of the simplicity of setup/production...
sien 4y ago
Oh gawd no. Podcasting is much, much better than radio ever was. Radio never had anything like Lex Fridman, Omega Tau, The Internet History Podcast, Gradient Dissent, or Econtalk. Where people with real expertise interview people with real expertise. In Econtalk's case you have interviews with a number of winners of the Economics sort of Nobel. There was never anything on any radio that was like that. There couldn't be. So much of this kind of thing is too niche for almost all radio. It's estimated that there are ~500K active podcasts ( https://www.thepodcasthost.com/listening/podcast-industry-stats/ https://www.thepodcasthost.com/listening/podcast-industry-st... ) Podcasting wasn't like radio when it started in the 2000s and it's very different now. Sure, there hasn't been another serial, but instead there is so much great stuff out there.
- _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
  Seriously, back in radio times I could here something super interesting maybe once a month (if even that). Now, I have so many things that I can listen to that specifically interest me at any time that I don't even have time to catch up.
- Inhibit 4y ago
  That's a good point. You or I could whack together a show that'd appeal to a hundred people across the globe for almost nothing. And if we enjoyed doing it there'd be no reason to stop. That bit of the conversation seems mostly lost in the comparisons.
  - sien 4y ago
    Yes. Exactly A friend of mine who is a writer made a podcast where she spoke to writers about how they write and their writing. She made ~100 episodes. It was incredible how professional it sounded. It was really remarkable. That's what podcasting makes possible. It's not a 'mass' medium such that cultural commentators can write about 'the hits' and where anyone cares what they have to say. With Serial being about the only big exception. But podcasts are a fantastic medium and they are different from radio.
- ekianjo 4y ago
bzxcvbn 4y ago
> “I was asking him, ‘Is this all going to end up shaking out like radio?’” Snyder told me. > In other words: a media business that mostly revolves around high-profile talking heads. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern for radio; Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, and the trio of Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes (who reportedly signed a deal with Amazon worth as much as $80 million) for podcasting. I don't know how radio is in the US, but this description of radio would be completely wrong here in France. There are tons of high-quality programming, in-depth debates by experts in various fields (you get Nobel-prize winning physicians discussing with Nobel-prize winning economists about COVID for example), series of documentaries on single topics, hilarious shows... Many of my favorite podcasts are literal radio shows that get uploaded to spotify &co.
pelasaco 4y ago
podcasting is radio.. but much easier to create your own pirate radio and have success, without having to join a big corporation or having to fit in the mainstream. Just watch the fight between CNN x Joe Rogan to see why podcasting is the real deal.
MrJagil 4y ago
I work on documentary style podcasting for one of the most respected and artsy podcast production companies in the world. In my small country we have maybe 2-3 shows i respect right now, across radio and podcasting (i dont really differentiate). The rest is awful. And not to offend, but the stuff you listen to is most likely awful as well. In the sense that Godard (rip) is a whole lot better than Marvel movies. Both are necessary and valuable in many ways, but the tentpole audio productions are few and far between. The reasons are obvious if you think about it: There is no (non-commercial) funding for great podcasting and there is no institutions that educate in this space and no one listens to and get inspired by the truly great and deep history of radio. No one knows what radio montage even means. Journalism, sure, The Daily is insanely well produced, but if you want "art" and great "storytelling", no dice. And here's an inside scoop: The people producing the "awful" stuff as i dare call it, they don't understand. They are not trained like the greats in film or music have been trained, so they do not have ambition or capacity to make truly great radio. I am speaking in bold and broad terms, but it is my conviction that most everyone is underestimating the format, even the ones on the inside.
WesleyLivesay 4y ago
It has been a long time since a subtitle on an article immediately soured me on it as much as this one did 5 seconds after I opened the article. Has there been an "everybody is listening" style hit since Serial? No. And I strongly disagree that it is even a desirable outcome. It is just something that happens extremely rarely in democratized content where the barrier of entry almost doesn't exist. This creates a landscape where an infinite number of niches can form and provide more content than you could ever listen to. Do you just want to hear discussions about philosophy? video game sub-genres? an author's books? sports team? Fantastic, there is probably hundreds of hours of content for you to listen to (or reject due to quality reasons). This does create an environment where "famous talking heads" can flourish, as mentioned in the article, but as long as the barrier to entry is low and the podcast platforms remain open, it also creates an environment where a terrific variety of content can flourish. What Serial did was get millions of people to investigate that Podcast app on their phone, but instead of then just bouncing to The Next Great Over-Produced Narrative Podcast they discovered there was a massive, and growing, number of podcasts that spoke directly to them. I've been podcasting since 2014 and the really interesting thing that happened after Serial got big is that I didn't have to describe what a podcast was anymore. That is why Serial was such a big deal to podcasting. All the Podcast companies trying to replicate the success of Serial are, in my mind, chasing a mirage. You can recreate the quality of the show, but you can't recreate the environment that it was released in, and it was that environment that made Serial a "hit".
- cxr 4y ago
  > the really interesting thing that happened after Serial got big is that I didn't have to describe what a podcast was anymore Maybe you should've. The semantic promiscuity with the use of the "podcast" is on par with the tragedy of "wikis". People calling things "podcasts" that are not available for download because you can only listen by running a specific app like Spotify; things that are just hour-long videos recorded and uploaded to YouTube and not actually available anywhere in podcast format; things that are never actually recorded because they're streamed live and disappear when the thing ends—none of these things are podcasts. I get it. Podcasts are sexy and marketable right now, so wouldn't it be good if we could use that word to describe our show, too—instead of just describing it as a "show"? It's obnoxious to have a word that means a thing and then not know if that's what someone is even talking about when you hear them use the word.
ricardobeat 4y ago
https://archive.ph/vfAOf https://archive.ph/vfAOf
OhHiMarkos 4y ago
I feel that the genre of audio documentaries didn't catch up all that much. At least to my opinion, because I never listened to anyone. Maybe that genre is in decline? The long form discussion podcasts to my opinion are going better and better. To me, the unedited long discussions between people, or even monologues, is podcasting.
guilhas 4y ago
Weeell... podcast is great, and I have been listening them since I can remember but podcast is not ubiquitous, I can't just start my car and ask it to continue my episode of 'I Spy' podcast Radio is still great most times but could improve, adding some more tech or specialized stations, but is harder to get now, many phones don't support it, or you need headphones connected to get signal, I remember a few years ago I would listen a lot from my phone but now it is impossible
abhinavkulkarni 4y ago
There are still problems with search and discovery though. A large scale transcription service needs to exist - potentially supported by client side transcription when GPUs become ubiquitous - at least for top podcasts. So many people have this gripe that they heard something in some podcast, but can't remember now. Also, at JKStream (https://jkstream.com https://jkstream.com), we are trying to solve one aspect of search & discovery. You can subscribe to your favorite podcast interviewers and guests and get notified.

54 points by thm 4y ago

YouTube is just TV.

hhmc 4y ago

I don't disagree with the premise of this article, but it's an incredible act of erasure to declare the meaningful start of podcasts to be 2014. There's a rich history in the preceding decade that's completely ignored (and would help explicate what's happened since).

QuarterReptile 4y ago
It's not hard to see the echo of the web in podcasts: Balkanization and commoditization. I think Econtalk was my first podcast, back in 2007 or so. It was not a crowded space, and the one show I listened to seemed interesting and well-made. More importantly, the guests were not on stop 62 of their 100 podcast marathon, so everything seemed fresher. By comparison, just about every podcast is produced better now than back then (though I doubt the necessity of 100MB file sizes for an hour of talk) and I can listen to 5 separate podcasts that have weekly content, all of which is more tightly tailored to me than my favorite 5 episodes of a year's worth of my favorite show in the old times. But that means there's too much stuff to meander through, plus I'll end up hearing the same person interviewed on all 5 shows. And, advertising everywhere. Most podcasts aren't the handsfree experience they used to be, now that I have to seek past ads every 15 minutes.
- mark_undoio 4y ago
  > And, advertising everywhere. Most podcasts aren't the handsfree experience they used to be, now that I have to seek past ads every 15 minutes. In some comedy podcasts, I can find the ad reads to be entertaining enough to be worth a listen. In others my heart sinks every time I hear the same pre-recorded ad (that annoyed me the first time) popping up again. Just how bad is it in general? Feels like there's an opportunity for good content in the ad breaks, even on non-silly podcasts - but that requires effort to generate something interesting / useful / fun that's not the same every time. OTOH, for some products it seems like spamming out the same content to build recognition does seem to be a rational (or at least popular!) strategy, which is a shame.
  - causi 4y ago
    Just how bad is it in general? Dynamic ads mean that ads get placed all through the whole show archive whenever they sign a contract. Sucks, right? Almost. The trick is to wait until a show's contract expires and before they've lined up a new one, download the whole show archive so you can enjoy it ad-free.
- Denvercoder9 4y ago
  > (though I doubt the necessity of 100MB file sizes for an hour of talk) An hour of uncompressed audio at a standard 44.1 kHz sample rate and 16 bit depth is 317 MB. Opinions on what's acceptable compression obviously vary, but I don't think 100 MB is too outrageous.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
  I, too, started listening to Econtalk right around when it came out, and the thing that stuck out to me the most, which seemed so unlike anything I ever came across, was just how long guests were allowed to speak. That seemed... just incredibly novel to me. Russ would think nothing of asking a question and then many minutes going by with the guest answering the question. There was a... slowness? to it, and genuine sense of a curiosity that felt remarkably novel compared to the rest of media that I used to consume. Since then, there's been just an insane proliferation of podcasts along the same line, but I think his pacing is still quite unique, and in many others I get the impression that the host is competing with the guest for attention, whereas with him it feels much more like some guest has been given a platform and I'm sitting there listening to him try to extract as much as he can from them.

black_puppydog 4y ago

My favourite podcasts all started as passion projects, often with a simple headset next to a laptop and no production to speak of. Some keep continuing like that (although typically people get a bit deeper into audio production as time passes) and some go "professional" after a while. The tendency to start out with a studio and crew from the get-go is always a red flag for me, and is indeed quite boring most of the time. What I want is just "two dudes talking" (or dudettes, that's fine too!) about something they're intensely, deeply interested in. Can be sociology, food, coding, whatever. It seems that's hard to set up for a commercial entity, who'd have thought?

QuarterReptile 4y ago
OTOH, the "two dudes talking" also produces the absolute worst podcast content when they do their small talk on air rather than getting it out of the way first. No podcast audience wants to hear your inside jokes and about how everyone's been making fun of you for your ski injury.
- dexterdog 4y ago
  I agree, but the success of the Bateman-Arnett-whatshisname podcast would suggest that we are both wrong.
- cooperadymas 4y ago
  And yet, nearly every popular podcast does this, so maybe the audience actually enjoys it? It's a bit like the story at the top of every recipe on the web. It annoys a certain type of people, but it's also the reason most of the people are there.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    You definitely have a variety of audience expectations and a given person's expectations may even differ by podcast. Some people like virtually hanging out with a lot of idle chit-chat, while others just want maximized information flow through a firehose. Neither is right or wrong and complaining that some information source doesn't match your preferences probably isn't going to get you anywhere.

rossng 4y ago

I was listening to podcasts that were more radio than art long before 2014. Surely that was the origin of the medium, and Serial was notable by its being an exception rather than the rule?

IgorPartola 4y ago

A really good discussion of this I heard recently (on a podcast) talked about how just like in the early days of YouTube people could tell there was potential there but nobody could quite tell how much effort it would take to make money off it and what kind of ROI there was. Then things like Serial (and specific YouTube properties they mentioned like Rocket Jump and VGHS) showed exactly what it took and what could be made from content specifically created for these platforms and now people have more of a blueprint. For example (these are my thoughts now), you can’t release a $300m AAA blockbuster movie directly on YouTube because you will never make your money back. But you can make money off unboxing videos.

christophilus 4y ago

Eh. There’s a podcast for every topic under the sun, and I can listen whenever I want, wherever I want; even offline. Podcasts are like Spotify or Napster or something. They’re a marked improvement over local radio, and by a long shot.

bluedays 4y ago

> Serial’s production company released S-Town, an almost anti-commercial literary-nonfiction project about the remarkable life of an unremarkable man. Yeah fuck this style of journalism. If he was unremarkable he wouldn’t have had a hit podcast made about him. This is an remarkable article written by an remarkable journalist.

ideamotor 4y ago
Did you listen to Shit Town?
- bluedays 4y ago
  Yeah it is one of the best podcasts I’ve ever listened to.
  - ideamotor 4y ago
    Then I was wooshed, thanks for clarifying.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

Zoomers and young millenials can't listen to radio - the word itself is uncool. Re-branding is important. If it's new, it's cool. And everything old is made new again. Functionally, of course there's some differences: podcasts are free from the physical limitations of radio, there's an unlimited number of channels, and anyone can start one. But at their essence, they're the same.

paulcole 4y ago
As much fun as it is to dunk on the current younger generations, this isn’t some new phenomenon. Older millennials, Gen-Xers, and Boomers didn’t think what their parents did was cool either.
- dexterdog 4y ago
  So are boomers really the start of everything wrong with today? What their parents did was actually pretty cool. Or is that just because I'm genx and people always think their grandparents are cooler than their parents?
  - paulcole 4y ago
    We’re all responsible for what’s wrong with today. If not responsible for the cause then responsible for fixing it. Or not. I don’t think it particularly matters either way.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
Local radio (especially AM?) has really gone to trash to the point that, if, hypothetically, people started broadcasting over-the-air pirate radio consisting of a curated list of back-to-back podcasts ... I would start sweeping the dial again.
Bakary 4y ago
I don't think this condescension is warranted. The functional differences make all the difference. The key part is not the physical limitations of radio but the content that can be played. You can aim content at a niche audience instead of having to play top 40 dad rock and talk about the news. That is the completely new part.

aaron695 4y ago

Is anyone reading the article? It's HN, so no I guess. Podcasts were radio. "Serial" happened and it became a event. Now they are back to radio. If you disagree name the podcast before "Serial" that we all know about? Or something recently. OT: Check out Apple TVs "Calls" for an interesting attempt at an almost entirely audio based TV Show https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9327706/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9327706/

ghaff 4y ago
I'm not going to look up all the start dates but quite a few from NPR (e.g. Radio Lab), 99 Percent Invisible, Freakonomics, etc. I agree that Serial became an event for a more mainstream audience but lots of people listened to podcasts before that--especially once smartphones became common.

sschueller 4y ago

Podcasting exited way before 2014. Just check Wikipedia. In fact Steve Jobs talked about it on stage so they were important enough for him, yet he died 2011... Great journalism /s

ghaff 4y ago
Podcasting existed back in the early 2000s assuming you define it as RSS audioblogs, e.g. Adam Curry. However, there was definitely a first generation which was in the vein of "Hey, I can do radio all by myself" and the current second generation. I don't know if 2014 is the right date--seems late--but there was definitely a difference in kind once you had automagical syncing on smartphones and a viable market for podcasts paying audio engineers and producers, etc.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > automagical syncing on smartphones What about the automagical syncing on ipods?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The only iPod I ever owned I had to plug in to sync. Cellular (and to a lesser degree WiFi) connectivity was a game changer for topical mobile content. The lack of same made things like the Palm Pilot far less useful than they would have otherwise been. For music, it didn't matter so much because people were mostly fine with having some 10s of GB of MP3s that they just updated from time to time.
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      You had to plug in to charge so at least for people working regularly with a computer there was zero additional effort required.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I traveled a lot and didn't necessarily charge daily on my primary computer. I can't say I really remember all the details--and there may well have been factors beyond easy syncing--but I didn't regularly listen to podcasts until I got an iPhone around 2010.

nonameking2026 4y ago

Improved radio, podcasts are great! I do wish we would have another name for "podcasts" that are only on Spotify f.x.

tartoran 4y ago
Spoticasts?
- nonameking2026 4y ago
  Wallcast - things requiring registration in any way.

lekevicius 4y ago

I host a nationwide radio show that we also publish as a podcast. Podcasting is not radio, as much as I'd enjoy that. We are the only show I'm aware of that publishes "show notes", links to things we talk about on the radio, encouraging listeners to check those things out. We are also deeply tied to the schedule: some of my favorite podcasts vary greatly in length, our show is exactly 25 minutes every time, with a reminder "what show you are listening to" around 12 minutes. Radio is still great at having massive, immediate, but highly passive audience. In every other regard, podcasts are so much better.

magic_hamster 4y ago

It was always going to be a sea of shows - the low barrier for entry, basically owning a microphone, means anyone can at least give it a shot. A bunch of friends rambling on Discord and calling that a podcast, is now a common practice. You need a very specific kind of person to produce a podcast worth your while. It needs to be extremely well researched, written for audio, and delivered a certain way. It will never be radio, regardless of the monetization model, because it's not live - which is arguably one of its biggest draws.

gertrunde 4y ago

Maybe I'm odd, but I don't really do podcasts at all. Which is quite frustrating, as there are various technical blogs I've followed over the years, and when some of them transition to a podcast, or a video equivalent, I just stop following. There's probably some useful/interesting information in there, I'm just not interested in suffering through the 40-50% waffle, or worse - meaningless video of a talking head.

danwee 4y ago
Same here. Usually in a podcast session of 1h, there is probably around 15 minutes of good content. The rest is just bluff, and with audio is difficult to skip the bluff.
VLM 4y ago
That is the exact target the commute time "morning radio show" used to have, but the radio became too lame to listen to, so now there's podcasts capturing the same market. Back when I had a commute, I found it a million times more relaxing to listen to anything OTHER than the technical stuff I was doing at work during my commute. Technical podcasts seemed to fit in pretty well at the gym or doing menial labor (yard work, etc) Audiobooks about contemporary issues that should have been a podcast don't work well; same with podcasts about issues that should have been a permanent audiobook.
footlose_3815 4y ago
[dead]
jcbrand 4y ago
IMO the way to do it is to make certain tasks a bit more enjoyable. I mainly listen to podcasts when cleaning, washing the dishes, doing the laundry or driving long distances. Compared to the vapid nonsense coming from radio DJs, many podcasters are verifiable geniuses.
- ghaff 4y ago
  For me, it's mostly driving which, since I haven't commuted in years, means I don't listen a lot. Doing stuff around the house? I would mostly only be half-listening and I don't really care for having background noise on in general when I'm at home. I also mostly don't listen to podcasts for technical content. I get plenty of that during the day.

oxff 4y ago

Only podcast where I felt the information value was high enough to listen to was "Signals & Threads", and even they provide a transcript. You can just put on most Youtube videos to 2x too. It's just such a useless thing, podcasts. Maybe if you have a long commute in public transport so you zone out for the duration.

ramboldio 4y ago

What is "just" radio suppose to mean? Radio is awesome.

digitalsankhara 4y ago
I agree. But I'm old and pedantic for whom the word Radio means on-air broadcasting. I love podcasts and often think, wow, these would make awesome broadcasts. Unfortunately, in the UK at least, VHF FM is, in my opinion, commercial drivel. As is Medium Wave (AM) band - same few media companies playing super safe music and content to fill the gaps between ads. The BBC is closing down MW transmitters and syndicating content to the remaining ones (esp. in the evening) thus loosing local community programs and forcing listeners onto DAB or online.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yes, radio has gone to shit in the U.S. as well.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
Yeah, gave me pause too. Maybe they mean ubiquitous like radio, mainstream like radio.
deleted 4y ago
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tchock23 4y ago

The story/narrative driven style of podcasting may be suffering from a lull, but interview style episodes on niche topics is flourishing.

ghaff 4y ago
>interview style episodes on niche topics is flourishing One key reason is that, so long as you're in a position to get interesting guests, a 30 minute interview (which is my preferred target length), given some prep and a reasonable standard of care on the technical aspects--which doesn't need to go crazy on microphones etc.--it's not a huge amount of work to create a good episode. And I never bothered with sponsors etc. It's also pretty cheap and easy to get a transcript made.
- tchock23 4y ago
  Agreed. It is flourishing largely as a function of the simplicity of setup/production...

sien 4y ago

Oh gawd no. Podcasting is much, much better than radio ever was. Radio never had anything like Lex Fridman, Omega Tau, The Internet History Podcast, Gradient Dissent, or Econtalk. Where people with real expertise interview people with real expertise. In Econtalk's case you have interviews with a number of winners of the Economics sort of Nobel. There was never anything on any radio that was like that. There couldn't be. So much of this kind of thing is too niche for almost all radio. It's estimated that there are ~500K active podcasts ( https://www.thepodcasthost.com/listening/podcast-industry-stats/ https://www.thepodcasthost.com/listening/podcast-industry-st... ) Podcasting wasn't like radio when it started in the 2000s and it's very different now. Sure, there hasn't been another serial, but instead there is so much great stuff out there.

_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
Seriously, back in radio times I could here something super interesting maybe once a month (if even that). Now, I have so many things that I can listen to that specifically interest me at any time that I don't even have time to catch up.
Inhibit 4y ago
That's a good point. You or I could whack together a show that'd appeal to a hundred people across the globe for almost nothing. And if we enjoyed doing it there'd be no reason to stop. That bit of the conversation seems mostly lost in the comparisons.
- sien 4y ago
  Yes. Exactly A friend of mine who is a writer made a podcast where she spoke to writers about how they write and their writing. She made ~100 episodes. It was incredible how professional it sounded. It was really remarkable. That's what podcasting makes possible. It's not a 'mass' medium such that cultural commentators can write about 'the hits' and where anyone cares what they have to say. With Serial being about the only big exception. But podcasts are a fantastic medium and they are different from radio.
ekianjo 4y ago

bzxcvbn 4y ago

> “I was asking him, ‘Is this all going to end up shaking out like radio?’” Snyder told me. > In other words: a media business that mostly revolves around high-profile talking heads. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern for radio; Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, and the trio of Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes (who reportedly signed a deal with Amazon worth as much as $80 million) for podcasting. I don't know how radio is in the US, but this description of radio would be completely wrong here in France. There are tons of high-quality programming, in-depth debates by experts in various fields (you get Nobel-prize winning physicians discussing with Nobel-prize winning economists about COVID for example), series of documentaries on single topics, hilarious shows... Many of my favorite podcasts are literal radio shows that get uploaded to spotify &co.

pelasaco 4y ago

podcasting is radio.. but much easier to create your own pirate radio and have success, without having to join a big corporation or having to fit in the mainstream. Just watch the fight between CNN x Joe Rogan to see why podcasting is the real deal.

MrJagil 4y ago

I work on documentary style podcasting for one of the most respected and artsy podcast production companies in the world. In my small country we have maybe 2-3 shows i respect right now, across radio and podcasting (i dont really differentiate). The rest is awful. And not to offend, but the stuff you listen to is most likely awful as well. In the sense that Godard (rip) is a whole lot better than Marvel movies. Both are necessary and valuable in many ways, but the tentpole audio productions are few and far between. The reasons are obvious if you think about it: There is no (non-commercial) funding for great podcasting and there is no institutions that educate in this space and no one listens to and get inspired by the truly great and deep history of radio. No one knows what radio montage even means. Journalism, sure, The Daily is insanely well produced, but if you want "art" and great "storytelling", no dice. And here's an inside scoop: The people producing the "awful" stuff as i dare call it, they don't understand. They are not trained like the greats in film or music have been trained, so they do not have ambition or capacity to make truly great radio. I am speaking in bold and broad terms, but it is my conviction that most everyone is underestimating the format, even the ones on the inside.

WesleyLivesay 4y ago

It has been a long time since a subtitle on an article immediately soured me on it as much as this one did 5 seconds after I opened the article. Has there been an "everybody is listening" style hit since Serial? No. And I strongly disagree that it is even a desirable outcome. It is just something that happens extremely rarely in democratized content where the barrier of entry almost doesn't exist. This creates a landscape where an infinite number of niches can form and provide more content than you could ever listen to. Do you just want to hear discussions about philosophy? video game sub-genres? an author's books? sports team? Fantastic, there is probably hundreds of hours of content for you to listen to (or reject due to quality reasons). This does create an environment where "famous talking heads" can flourish, as mentioned in the article, but as long as the barrier to entry is low and the podcast platforms remain open, it also creates an environment where a terrific variety of content can flourish. What Serial did was get millions of people to investigate that Podcast app on their phone, but instead of then just bouncing to The Next Great Over-Produced Narrative Podcast they discovered there was a massive, and growing, number of podcasts that spoke directly to them. I've been podcasting since 2014 and the really interesting thing that happened after Serial got big is that I didn't have to describe what a podcast was anymore. That is why Serial was such a big deal to podcasting. All the Podcast companies trying to replicate the success of Serial are, in my mind, chasing a mirage. You can recreate the quality of the show, but you can't recreate the environment that it was released in, and it was that environment that made Serial a "hit".

cxr 4y ago
> the really interesting thing that happened after Serial got big is that I didn't have to describe what a podcast was anymore Maybe you should've. The semantic promiscuity with the use of the "podcast" is on par with the tragedy of "wikis". People calling things "podcasts" that are not available for download because you can only listen by running a specific app like Spotify; things that are just hour-long videos recorded and uploaded to YouTube and not actually available anywhere in podcast format; things that are never actually recorded because they're streamed live and disappear when the thing ends—none of these things are podcasts. I get it. Podcasts are sexy and marketable right now, so wouldn't it be good if we could use that word to describe our show, too—instead of just describing it as a "show"? It's obnoxious to have a word that means a thing and then not know if that's what someone is even talking about when you hear them use the word.

ricardobeat 4y ago

https://archive.ph/vfAOf https://archive.ph/vfAOf

OhHiMarkos 4y ago

I feel that the genre of audio documentaries didn't catch up all that much. At least to my opinion, because I never listened to anyone. Maybe that genre is in decline? The long form discussion podcasts to my opinion are going better and better. To me, the unedited long discussions between people, or even monologues, is podcasting.

guilhas 4y ago

Weeell... podcast is great, and I have been listening them since I can remember but podcast is not ubiquitous, I can't just start my car and ask it to continue my episode of 'I Spy' podcast Radio is still great most times but could improve, adding some more tech or specialized stations, but is harder to get now, many phones don't support it, or you need headphones connected to get signal, I remember a few years ago I would listen a lot from my phone but now it is impossible

abhinavkulkarni 4y ago

There are still problems with search and discovery though. A large scale transcription service needs to exist - potentially supported by client side transcription when GPUs become ubiquitous - at least for top podcasts. So many people have this gripe that they heard something in some podcast, but can't remember now. Also, at JKStream (https://jkstream.com https://jkstream.com), we are trying to solve one aspect of search & discovery. You can subscribe to your favorite podcast interviewers and guests and get notified.