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A few points he forgot to mention about audio, without answering it's hard to make a convincing argument: 1. There isn't a lack of sound currently. there are t
by ippisl 15y ago
A few points he forgot to mention about audio, without answering it's hard to make a convincing argument:
1. There isn't a lack of sound currently. there are tons of podcasts , and even more video shows that can be consumed as sound(lectures, talk shows) . And there's a lot of music. Lack of content is not a problem or a reason for growth of future audio consumption.
2. People already consume alot of sound. Mostly in the form of music , because of it's emotional content. There's no reason to suspect they'll consume more music.
3. It's easier to communicate in writing, because you can easily edit it. Communicating with sound is more difficult(if you want to offer interesting content).
4. People prefer high bandwidth communication mediums over low bandwidth communication mediums. People prefer communication mediums you can control their speed and skip over content easily.
Why ? Both of this issues help with flow and engagement.
5. lack of good podcast monetization scheme. since good audio is much harder to produce than text , that's important.
EDIT: most of the work on making spoken audio interesting has been done on the content side. Relatively little has been done on the technology side. I wonder if there are some opportunities there.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tobtoh 15y agoAgree with all the points - especially #3. The speaker made a case that recording with sound was a lot easier and that's why it's better. Whilst it's an advantage, I don't see it as a compelling reason. Frontpage made 'web design' easy - but it hardly lead to great websites by the masses. The best Frontpage sites still took a lot of work, skill, editing, and reviews. The value with most content is not the generation - it's in the editing. And that is where sound (and video) suffer compared to text - it's pretty difficult to beat the ease with which you can edit text.
- wslh 15y agoAnd the search cost problem. It's difficult to be findable.
- ansgri 15y agoThat at least can be solved by technology.
- wslh 15y agowell, I think it's not being solved with technology right now. If individuals need to spend a lot of time in marketing and sales (i.e.: SEO, SEM) then there is not enough time for creation. The problem with the usual long tail analysis is not that stuff in the tail have few customers, it's a lot of the tail is not discoverable.
- marquis 15y agoAnother example: if presented with a podcast with transcript, I'll almost always read the transcript than listen. Unless the speaker is someone I'm really engaged to hear specifically I prefer to skim in order to rapidly gather the information (see NPRs audio/transcript style for example, I love that they do this). And who would listen to a 'radio' station made of music generated by an iPad app? You can give someone the most advanced creation tools in the world and if they are not inherently a musician it's going to be a series of notes, not 'music'. I agree with you that his argument is not convincing, though there is certainly a huge space for innovation yet to come with audio creators and connecting them with listeners. Soundcloud is doing pretty well on this front so far.