7 ms·

A New Era of Podcast Mergers Is Just Beginning

40 points by marban 3y ago

WheatMillington 3y ago
I'm sorry to say that podcasting's best days are behind us. Podcasts were so great when it was about discovery and sharing. Now podcasts are so heavily corporatised I'm barely able to enjoy them between ads and self promotion.
- hbn 3y ago
  If you're sticking to the corporate shlock that's promoted on the front "explore" page of every podcast app, sure. If you stick to smaller podcasts that are patreon-backed or have a couple 1-minute ad breaks in the entire 90 minute show, it's fine. I mostly listen to comedy podcasts anyway and they tend to make ad reads entertaining by riffing on them. If it's just someone reading from a script, I'd skip it.
  - bityard 3y ago
    Can you recommend any comedy podcasts? I tried a few improv podcasts which had reasonably good reviews but for my taste, the quality was anywhere between "mildly entertaining" and "I'd rather snack on a big ol' bowl of fire-damaged roof shingles"
    - selectodude 3y ago
      Bill Burr’s podcast has been whipping the llamas ass for a long time now.
      - hombre_fatal 3y ago
        Check out Tim Dillon’s podcast.
      - goles 3y ago
        Check out Anything Better if you haven't. It's my favorite podcast even though they don't do it that frequently anymore. It's just two friends trying to make each other laugh and bitch about their wifes, sports, smoking sticks and drinking.
    - evancordell 3y ago
      Do you just mean comedic quality or do you mean production quality as well? Some that I've listened to are good on both fronts (in my opinion): Mission To Zyxx, Dungeons and Daddies, Beef and Dairy Network.
    - jabroni_salad 3y ago
      If you specifically like improv then Hey Riddle Riddle is pretty good, and their neighbor Hello from the Magic Tavern. The anchor characters here perform at the Io Theater in chicago. None of them touch on current events and the tavern's meta narrative is not important so just click anyone that that catches your eye.
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      I've started listening to the back catalogue (as in like, from 2007) of The Flop House, and I'm enjoying it. I'm not sure what a 'comedy podcast' is exactly, but a bunch of commedians reviewing bad podcasts is alright.
      - theluketaylor 3y ago
        Love The Flop House. I'd also recommend Judge John Hodgman (which is also part of the Maximum Fun network, but if you're in 2007 that hasn't happened yet in the Flop House timeline)
      - hbn 3y ago
        Who Are These Podcasts also does a podcast roast, though the second half of each episode tends to be joking around about burnt-out satellite radio stars (Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, etc) and I have no idea about any of that history so I usually just listen to the first half.
    - hbn 3y ago
      Taste varies, 2 of my favorites right now are The Biggest Problem in the Universe and The Boyscast. There's also The Snow Plow Show which is just a guy who does prank calls. I'm sure a lot of people would find the humor in any or all of these crass, but it's what I enjoy!
    - jszymborski 3y ago
      Off Book is great if you love musical theatre and/or improv
    - noree 3y ago
      Cum Town. Or The Adam Friedland show if you're more center-left leaning.
    - Zizizizz 3y ago
      If I Were You by Jake and Amir was going for a decade I think but just finished. The questions are timeless though so you can easily go back and binge if you want
- themagician 3y ago
  Podcasts today are fundamentally different from podcasts of yesterday. Some of the old ones still exist, but for the most part the industry has been completely transformed. The word means something different now. Podcasting started with a mix of radio drama and some really incredible radio journalism—a lost art. Podcasting transformed into parasocial background noise. Most top "podcasts" today are just people talking. It's like roundtable discussions with no script, no sound design and often no real production of any kind. As with reality TV, it turns out that's where the money was all along. If it doesn't cost anything to produce then you can create endless hours at zero marginal cost. Why people listen to this stuff I honestly have no idea, but they do. There are still a few things I find worth listening to and I often find myself going back into the back catalogs of This American Life and Radiolab. But when you think about the "good stuff" you start to realize very quickly why there isn't much of it. Creating an engaging one hour long audio drama that really pulls you in is very expensive. It's hard to do that once, let along every week. It's expensive to produce, time intensive, and then you've got bandwidth costs on top of all of that. Some of the really iconic podcasts took months or even years to make, and they were almost always made at a break even or a loss. Now you can record two people having some beers for two hours, monetize it, and post it same day. You can do it multiple times a week. Someone else will pay all the bandwidth costs and send you a check.
  - ironmagma 3y ago
    I am subscribed to 115 different podcasts but just end up listening to Dear Hank and John episodes on repeat. It’s a sad state of the podcasting world. The only other show I found that was really enjoyable to listen to was Hello Internet (actually one of the first popular podcasts) and it went on indefinite hiatus years ago.
  - morsch 3y ago
    Interview and talk podcasts have always been popular. I'm not sure why that's surprising? It's an established format in all media, and in my experience podcasts aren't bad at it -- certainly much better than TV which these days seems to be universally terrible at it; there are some tradeoffs when compared to written formats. Individual talk podcasts or episodes tend to be as good or as bad as the people in them. This is also not surprising? Edit -- here's a somewhat tenuous Top 10 list from 2005, via Web archive via USA Today (of all places) via Wikipedia History of podcasting. A few of them are still going, 18 years later. They're mostly people talking, not radio drama or stone cold journalism: 1. The Dawn and Drew Show, dawnanddrew.com: Married-couple banter. 2. Engadget, engadget.com: Technology news and gadget reviews. 3. Reel Reviews, mwgblog.com: Reviews of current and classic movies. 4. IT Conversations, itconversations.com: Hard-core tech talk. 5. The Daily Source Code, live.curry.com: Adam Curry with podcasting news and the latest shows. 6. Coverville, coverville.com: All about cover songs, the good, the bad and the never-should-have-been-recorded. 7. Free Talk Live, freetalklive.com: Political talk radio with a libertarian perspective. 8. The MacCast, maccast.blogspot.com: All things Macintosh, by and for Mac nuts. 9. The Rock and Roll Geek Show, americanheartbreak.com/movabletype: One fan trails rock's less charted waters. 10. Tracks Up the Tree, upthetree.com: Music show featuring artists whose tunes are available online. http://web.archive.org/web/20060207133911/https://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2005-02-09-podcasting-usat-money-cover_x.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20060207133911/https://www.usatod... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting#Wider_notice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting#Wider_no...
- dnissley 3y ago
  I maintain that there were never any consistently good podcasts[1]. There were and are many good podcast episodes, however. Because of this I've never really understood the whole "subscribing" deal -- I always end up subscribing to hundreds of podcasts that all had one or two good episodes, but basically almost never have a good episode ever again. It's also been my experience that most people who are especially into one podcast are in a parasocial relationship with the host(s). 1: For the purposes of this argument, I'll say this means >50% good episodes, but even setting the bar at 10% doesn't change much.
  - zerkten 3y ago
    It's hard to evaluate your experience without knowing more about you and the podcasts you subscribed to. Can you share more? In my experience, repeat listening is going to depend on the content and style of the podcast. Some will naturally bring you along while others can't generate great output consistently. The pattern I see is guest participation in the great episodes. Guests can't sustain a podcast unless there is a strong pipeline. A podcast like Accidental Tech Podcast is consistently great for the fanbase, to the point where they'll pay for unedited versions. There have only been a few guests over the years and it's completely sustained by the creators. The Rest is History is completely sustained by the creators, but guests are regularly included. Sometimes I'm disappointed when they have a guest. CoRecursive depends on guests and has much more variability for me.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  If you like this comment, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
I wonder what level of mergers is optimal and who the winners will be.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Optimal for who? Because I think it's equal and opposite goals.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Not a podcaster. On the one hand, you have network effects, where everyone would be on a podcasting platform because everyone else is. On the other hand, you have the rise and fall of streaming services, where there are so many of them with exclusive rights to IP that it's just neo-cable at this point. Too many podcasting platforms will tire out consumers who want to manage podcasts they like, too few and we get monopoly (monopsony maybe). So maybe there's an "optimal'" number of platforms, 5? 6? that offer choice and variety without being overwhelming and haphazard.
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      Honestly, I still use a dedicated podcasting app that podcasts can add their RSS feed to. It's so painless, I don't know why it needs to be optimized.
idopmstuff 3y ago
I have to say I've become a big fan of Bloomberg's podcasts - the quality of hosts and guests is high, and they use the format well, getting to a greater level of depth on each topic than you get out of most news media. Odd Lots is fantastic if you're into economics/finance and/or supply chains (they've really moved towards the latter since the pandemic and get great guests - e.g. when the ports were all back up, they had the guy who runs the Port of LA on for an episode). What's Next TBD and The Big Take are both great as well. I just wish they'd get Matt Levine to do a podcast.
gnabgib 3y ago
https://archive.is/wpEfb https://archive.is/wpEfb
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
It is often said that time is a circle. This seems like a return to more corporate-style media, because it's hard to make money when you're constantly discussing edgy or controversial topics. When Joe Rogan sold out to Spotify, he claimed to retain full editorial freedom, but he ended up removing tons of episodes and the tone of his podcast definitely started to shift. All endless entertainment mediums start to become plagued by similar problems, when people start running out of ideas and they've explored all the topics in which they're knowledgeable. In TV-land it was common to have people on as guests to promote their work, and podcasts innovated by allowing those guests to have more time to discuss their ideas.
- jerf 3y ago
  To me, the question to keep an eye out on is not whether huge podcasts end up in the same attraction basin as conventional mass media, but whether it remains possible for someone to practically run a 1000-subscriber podcast, and similarly, whether or not the lower rungs of the ladder remain or if they end up pulled up. There is certainly no technical reason why it should be hard to run a podcast, and I don't expect the largest podcasting hosts to do anything but push the largest podcasts, but as long as the low end remains an interesting, bubbling froth of anyone who has a modestly interesting opinion about anything and they're still available for anyone to find if they try, I'm not too worried.
legitster 3y ago
For me, the implosion of Gimlet Media was really the signal for the end of the era. They had a handful of amazing and popular shows. They used the success to plow money and resources into kickstarting other shows. But the other shows were never as good or successful. Eventually you had enough people bitter and resentful about the continued success of the golden gooses that they all ran the company into the ground together. The barriers of entry to podcasting are too low so it's hard to rise above the noise. First mover advantage and network effects are/were everything.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  What is particularly irksome is that it imploded pretty directly as a result of the Spotify merger.
  - legitster 3y ago
    Yeah, what an embarrassing failure all around. It's hard to imagine what Spotify was even thinking with their strategy there. They paid all of this money for Reply All just to give it away for free, then made all of the tiny little shows exclusives? And started cancelling shows because they had no audience?
    - jszymborski 3y ago
      I adored Heavyweight, but the moment they went Spotify exclusive, I stopped listening. I'm the sort of person who will donate to Maximum Fun, and I'd even pay for Heavyweight (e.g. Patreon or some other way that let's me have RSS feeds), but when you wall up your services is when I'll stop listening. I hope Jonathan Goldstein does some cool stuff for less shitty patrons.
      - Kye 3y ago
        I think co-ops are the right model for podcasts. Maximum Fun got it right. There isn't enough money in podcasting for the quarterly earnings treadmill, but there is enough to keep a roster of niche shows running with the ad buying, fundraising, and cross-promotion power of a large network.
karaterobot 3y ago
The main reason to start a network is to get better deals on advertising, which implies a relatively sophisticated approach driven by the desire to monetize the format not as a lifestyle business, but as a business business. The entry of savvy, business-minded people marked the end of the wild and woolly first era of podcasting. I'd say the success of true crime as a format (Serial), and the growth of celebrity podcasts characterized the second era. This happened at roughly the same time as bigger, venture-backed networks started forming. There had been networks before, but they were comparatively amateur efforts. This new wave of mergers is just a continuation of what's been going on for years. It's not a new thing. If anything, the main difference is that instead of podcasts being scooped up by networks, now it's that networks are being scooped up by other networks. That's interesting, but more of an evolution of an ongoing process than the signal that we're entering a new phase. By the way, I've been listening to podcasts since 2006, and I'm sort of in the slow process of losing interest in them finally. There are still a lot of good ones, but it's kind of become a wasteland of content (for me, to my tastes) in the last few years. They managed to take a fundamentally shaggy, decentralized platform and turn it into a polished, down the middle knock-off of TV and terrestrial radio.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  There are literally thousands of podcasts out there that are not polished knock-offs of terrestrial broadcast media. If you aren't finding them you aren't looking very hard.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    There are still a lot of good ones, but it's kind of become a wasteland of content (for me, to my tastes) in the last few years.
earthboundkid 3y ago
There are no synergies in podcast mergers. The only point is to try to get big enough to have leverage against advertisers and monopolize buying. It won't work, and after a few years all the mergers will be unwound/go broke, just like every other media merger does. The only successful media merger of our time has been Disney buying up all IP ever, and it has been successful just because it's so limited: get IPs that are known to make money and use them to make money. Every other attempt to get synergy by combining Netscape and AOL with Time with Warner Bros. with GE with NBC etc. has been a failure, and even Disney is relatively failing with Disney+ because they don't actually have enough IP yet to monopolize streaming and jack up prices to a profitable rate.
narrator 3y ago
Podcasting is a unique business. It's the talk radio of the internet. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act [1] passed and that allowed ClearChannel to buy every radio station in the country and consolidate it up into a boring homogenous product. No longer were there local DJs promoting bands that would create completely new types of music every decade. All the music genres froze in place and that was that. Now we have podcasting which is incredibly cheap to run. It's incredibly cheap to host. Anyone can do it. It's even less cancelable than telegram channels. There's no app store. It's an audio file. There are plenty of independent podcast apps that do not go through a cloud provider. It's the greatest use case ever for RSS! It's also deeply intellectual, or stupid, or controversial, but it's a million different things to a million different people. In my opinion, it's as close to the true promise of the internet realized as any media that has come along since the 90s. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
- Kye 3y ago
  >> "All the music genres froze in place and that was that." Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're saying music hasn't evolved any since the late 1990s. There is an incredible blending of rap, breakbeats, punk, metal, and rock happening as we speak. And that's just the last few years. Places like Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and Beatport are rich with new kinds of music and new takes on the past. Even Soundcloud is still holding on in its bot takeover era. 1996 was the year before MP3.com. Napster two years later.
  - FreeFull 3y ago
    On the other hand, how much of that is actually making it into the mainstream? Although, it's debatable how much of a "mainstream" there even is, any more.
  - ebiester 3y ago
    It's speaking with respect to radio. It's why you wonder who is listening to Ed Sheeran and Imagine Dragons but they're somehow so popular.
  - 3y ago
boredumb 3y ago
Now that some form of natural and somewhat enjoyable entertainment emerges it was only a matter of time before it inevitably became massively commercialized and brought under the big tent of neutered entertainment "advertiser friendly content"
jszymborski 3y ago
Why aren't producer-owned podcast co-ops more of a thing? Such co-ops could sell their own ad spots, pool funds to promote network shows, manage a subscription service, pay-out dividends, etc...
- Macha 3y ago
  Aren't they? Most of the podcasts I listen to seem to be this model (Relay FM, various tabletop podcasts)
  - jszymborski 3y ago
    They serve the same function, but are they a producer-owned model? That helps a lot towards acrimonious acquisitions like what happened between Gimlet and Spotify.

40 points by marban 3y ago

I'm sorry to say that podcasting's best days are behind us. Podcasts were so great when it was about discovery and sharing. Now podcasts are so heavily corporatised I'm barely able to enjoy them between ads and self promotion.

hbn 3y ago
If you're sticking to the corporate shlock that's promoted on the front "explore" page of every podcast app, sure. If you stick to smaller podcasts that are patreon-backed or have a couple 1-minute ad breaks in the entire 90 minute show, it's fine. I mostly listen to comedy podcasts anyway and they tend to make ad reads entertaining by riffing on them. If it's just someone reading from a script, I'd skip it.
- bityard 3y ago
  Can you recommend any comedy podcasts? I tried a few improv podcasts which had reasonably good reviews but for my taste, the quality was anywhere between "mildly entertaining" and "I'd rather snack on a big ol' bowl of fire-damaged roof shingles"
  - selectodude 3y ago
    Bill Burr’s podcast has been whipping the llamas ass for a long time now.
    - hombre_fatal 3y ago
      Check out Tim Dillon’s podcast.
    - goles 3y ago
      Check out Anything Better if you haven't. It's my favorite podcast even though they don't do it that frequently anymore. It's just two friends trying to make each other laugh and bitch about their wifes, sports, smoking sticks and drinking.
  - evancordell 3y ago
    Do you just mean comedic quality or do you mean production quality as well? Some that I've listened to are good on both fronts (in my opinion): Mission To Zyxx, Dungeons and Daddies, Beef and Dairy Network.
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    If you specifically like improv then Hey Riddle Riddle is pretty good, and their neighbor Hello from the Magic Tavern. The anchor characters here perform at the Io Theater in chicago. None of them touch on current events and the tavern's meta narrative is not important so just click anyone that that catches your eye.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    I've started listening to the back catalogue (as in like, from 2007) of The Flop House, and I'm enjoying it. I'm not sure what a 'comedy podcast' is exactly, but a bunch of commedians reviewing bad podcasts is alright.
    - theluketaylor 3y ago
      Love The Flop House. I'd also recommend Judge John Hodgman (which is also part of the Maximum Fun network, but if you're in 2007 that hasn't happened yet in the Flop House timeline)
    - hbn 3y ago
      Who Are These Podcasts also does a podcast roast, though the second half of each episode tends to be joking around about burnt-out satellite radio stars (Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, etc) and I have no idea about any of that history so I usually just listen to the first half.
  - hbn 3y ago
    Taste varies, 2 of my favorites right now are The Biggest Problem in the Universe and The Boyscast. There's also The Snow Plow Show which is just a guy who does prank calls. I'm sure a lot of people would find the humor in any or all of these crass, but it's what I enjoy!
  - jszymborski 3y ago
    Off Book is great if you love musical theatre and/or improv
  - noree 3y ago
    Cum Town. Or The Adam Friedland show if you're more center-left leaning.
  - Zizizizz 3y ago
    If I Were You by Jake and Amir was going for a decade I think but just finished. The questions are timeless though so you can easily go back and binge if you want
themagician 3y ago
Podcasts today are fundamentally different from podcasts of yesterday. Some of the old ones still exist, but for the most part the industry has been completely transformed. The word means something different now. Podcasting started with a mix of radio drama and some really incredible radio journalism—a lost art. Podcasting transformed into parasocial background noise. Most top "podcasts" today are just people talking. It's like roundtable discussions with no script, no sound design and often no real production of any kind. As with reality TV, it turns out that's where the money was all along. If it doesn't cost anything to produce then you can create endless hours at zero marginal cost. Why people listen to this stuff I honestly have no idea, but they do. There are still a few things I find worth listening to and I often find myself going back into the back catalogs of This American Life and Radiolab. But when you think about the "good stuff" you start to realize very quickly why there isn't much of it. Creating an engaging one hour long audio drama that really pulls you in is very expensive. It's hard to do that once, let along every week. It's expensive to produce, time intensive, and then you've got bandwidth costs on top of all of that. Some of the really iconic podcasts took months or even years to make, and they were almost always made at a break even or a loss. Now you can record two people having some beers for two hours, monetize it, and post it same day. You can do it multiple times a week. Someone else will pay all the bandwidth costs and send you a check.
- ironmagma 3y ago
  I am subscribed to 115 different podcasts but just end up listening to Dear Hank and John episodes on repeat. It’s a sad state of the podcasting world. The only other show I found that was really enjoyable to listen to was Hello Internet (actually one of the first popular podcasts) and it went on indefinite hiatus years ago.
- morsch 3y ago
  Interview and talk podcasts have always been popular. I'm not sure why that's surprising? It's an established format in all media, and in my experience podcasts aren't bad at it -- certainly much better than TV which these days seems to be universally terrible at it; there are some tradeoffs when compared to written formats. Individual talk podcasts or episodes tend to be as good or as bad as the people in them. This is also not surprising? Edit -- here's a somewhat tenuous Top 10 list from 2005, via Web archive via USA Today (of all places) via Wikipedia History of podcasting. A few of them are still going, 18 years later. They're mostly people talking, not radio drama or stone cold journalism: 1. The Dawn and Drew Show, dawnanddrew.com: Married-couple banter. 2. Engadget, engadget.com: Technology news and gadget reviews. 3. Reel Reviews, mwgblog.com: Reviews of current and classic movies. 4. IT Conversations, itconversations.com: Hard-core tech talk. 5. The Daily Source Code, live.curry.com: Adam Curry with podcasting news and the latest shows. 6. Coverville, coverville.com: All about cover songs, the good, the bad and the never-should-have-been-recorded. 7. Free Talk Live, freetalklive.com: Political talk radio with a libertarian perspective. 8. The MacCast, maccast.blogspot.com: All things Macintosh, by and for Mac nuts. 9. The Rock and Roll Geek Show, americanheartbreak.com/movabletype: One fan trails rock's less charted waters. 10. Tracks Up the Tree, upthetree.com: Music show featuring artists whose tunes are available online. http://web.archive.org/web/20060207133911/https://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2005-02-09-podcasting-usat-money-cover_x.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20060207133911/https://www.usatod... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting#Wider_notice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting#Wider_no...
dnissley 3y ago
I maintain that there were never any consistently good podcasts[1]. There were and are many good podcast episodes, however. Because of this I've never really understood the whole "subscribing" deal -- I always end up subscribing to hundreds of podcasts that all had one or two good episodes, but basically almost never have a good episode ever again. It's also been my experience that most people who are especially into one podcast are in a parasocial relationship with the host(s). 1: For the purposes of this argument, I'll say this means >50% good episodes, but even setting the bar at 10% doesn't change much.
- zerkten 3y ago
  It's hard to evaluate your experience without knowing more about you and the podcasts you subscribed to. Can you share more? In my experience, repeat listening is going to depend on the content and style of the podcast. Some will naturally bring you along while others can't generate great output consistently. The pattern I see is guest participation in the great episodes. Guests can't sustain a podcast unless there is a strong pipeline. A podcast like Accidental Tech Podcast is consistently great for the fanbase, to the point where they'll pay for unedited versions. There have only been a few guests over the years and it's completely sustained by the creators. The Rest is History is completely sustained by the creators, but guests are regularly included. Sometimes I'm disappointed when they have a guest. CoRecursive depends on guests and has much more variability for me.
earthboundkid 3y ago
If you like this comment, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

I wonder what level of mergers is optimal and who the winners will be.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Optimal for who? Because I think it's equal and opposite goals.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Not a podcaster. On the one hand, you have network effects, where everyone would be on a podcasting platform because everyone else is. On the other hand, you have the rise and fall of streaming services, where there are so many of them with exclusive rights to IP that it's just neo-cable at this point. Too many podcasting platforms will tire out consumers who want to manage podcasts they like, too few and we get monopoly (monopsony maybe). So maybe there's an "optimal'" number of platforms, 5? 6? that offer choice and variety without being overwhelming and haphazard.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Honestly, I still use a dedicated podcasting app that podcasts can add their RSS feed to. It's so painless, I don't know why it needs to be optimized.

idopmstuff 3y ago

I have to say I've become a big fan of Bloomberg's podcasts - the quality of hosts and guests is high, and they use the format well, getting to a greater level of depth on each topic than you get out of most news media. Odd Lots is fantastic if you're into economics/finance and/or supply chains (they've really moved towards the latter since the pandemic and get great guests - e.g. when the ports were all back up, they had the guy who runs the Port of LA on for an episode). What's Next TBD and The Big Take are both great as well. I just wish they'd get Matt Levine to do a podcast.

gnabgib 3y ago

https://archive.is/wpEfb https://archive.is/wpEfb

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

It is often said that time is a circle. This seems like a return to more corporate-style media, because it's hard to make money when you're constantly discussing edgy or controversial topics. When Joe Rogan sold out to Spotify, he claimed to retain full editorial freedom, but he ended up removing tons of episodes and the tone of his podcast definitely started to shift. All endless entertainment mediums start to become plagued by similar problems, when people start running out of ideas and they've explored all the topics in which they're knowledgeable. In TV-land it was common to have people on as guests to promote their work, and podcasts innovated by allowing those guests to have more time to discuss their ideas.

jerf 3y ago
To me, the question to keep an eye out on is not whether huge podcasts end up in the same attraction basin as conventional mass media, but whether it remains possible for someone to practically run a 1000-subscriber podcast, and similarly, whether or not the lower rungs of the ladder remain or if they end up pulled up. There is certainly no technical reason why it should be hard to run a podcast, and I don't expect the largest podcasting hosts to do anything but push the largest podcasts, but as long as the low end remains an interesting, bubbling froth of anyone who has a modestly interesting opinion about anything and they're still available for anyone to find if they try, I'm not too worried.

legitster 3y ago

For me, the implosion of Gimlet Media was really the signal for the end of the era. They had a handful of amazing and popular shows. They used the success to plow money and resources into kickstarting other shows. But the other shows were never as good or successful. Eventually you had enough people bitter and resentful about the continued success of the golden gooses that they all ran the company into the ground together. The barriers of entry to podcasting are too low so it's hard to rise above the noise. First mover advantage and network effects are/were everything.

jszymborski 3y ago
What is particularly irksome is that it imploded pretty directly as a result of the Spotify merger.
- legitster 3y ago
  Yeah, what an embarrassing failure all around. It's hard to imagine what Spotify was even thinking with their strategy there. They paid all of this money for Reply All just to give it away for free, then made all of the tiny little shows exclusives? And started cancelling shows because they had no audience?
  - jszymborski 3y ago
    I adored Heavyweight, but the moment they went Spotify exclusive, I stopped listening. I'm the sort of person who will donate to Maximum Fun, and I'd even pay for Heavyweight (e.g. Patreon or some other way that let's me have RSS feeds), but when you wall up your services is when I'll stop listening. I hope Jonathan Goldstein does some cool stuff for less shitty patrons.
    - Kye 3y ago
      I think co-ops are the right model for podcasts. Maximum Fun got it right. There isn't enough money in podcasting for the quarterly earnings treadmill, but there is enough to keep a roster of niche shows running with the ad buying, fundraising, and cross-promotion power of a large network.

karaterobot 3y ago

The main reason to start a network is to get better deals on advertising, which implies a relatively sophisticated approach driven by the desire to monetize the format not as a lifestyle business, but as a business business. The entry of savvy, business-minded people marked the end of the wild and woolly first era of podcasting. I'd say the success of true crime as a format (Serial), and the growth of celebrity podcasts characterized the second era. This happened at roughly the same time as bigger, venture-backed networks started forming. There had been networks before, but they were comparatively amateur efforts. This new wave of mergers is just a continuation of what's been going on for years. It's not a new thing. If anything, the main difference is that instead of podcasts being scooped up by networks, now it's that networks are being scooped up by other networks. That's interesting, but more of an evolution of an ongoing process than the signal that we're entering a new phase. By the way, I've been listening to podcasts since 2006, and I'm sort of in the slow process of losing interest in them finally. There are still a lot of good ones, but it's kind of become a wasteland of content (for me, to my tastes) in the last few years. They managed to take a fundamentally shaggy, decentralized platform and turn it into a polished, down the middle knock-off of TV and terrestrial radio.

idiotsecant 3y ago
There are literally thousands of podcasts out there that are not polished knock-offs of terrestrial broadcast media. If you aren't finding them you aren't looking very hard.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  There are still a lot of good ones, but it's kind of become a wasteland of content (for me, to my tastes) in the last few years.

earthboundkid 3y ago

There are no synergies in podcast mergers. The only point is to try to get big enough to have leverage against advertisers and monopolize buying. It won't work, and after a few years all the mergers will be unwound/go broke, just like every other media merger does. The only successful media merger of our time has been Disney buying up all IP ever, and it has been successful just because it's so limited: get IPs that are known to make money and use them to make money. Every other attempt to get synergy by combining Netscape and AOL with Time with Warner Bros. with GE with NBC etc. has been a failure, and even Disney is relatively failing with Disney+ because they don't actually have enough IP yet to monopolize streaming and jack up prices to a profitable rate.

narrator 3y ago

Podcasting is a unique business. It's the talk radio of the internet. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act [1] passed and that allowed ClearChannel to buy every radio station in the country and consolidate it up into a boring homogenous product. No longer were there local DJs promoting bands that would create completely new types of music every decade. All the music genres froze in place and that was that. Now we have podcasting which is incredibly cheap to run. It's incredibly cheap to host. Anyone can do it. It's even less cancelable than telegram channels. There's no app store. It's an audio file. There are plenty of independent podcast apps that do not go through a cloud provider. It's the greatest use case ever for RSS! It's also deeply intellectual, or stupid, or controversial, but it's a million different things to a million different people. In my opinion, it's as close to the true promise of the internet realized as any media that has come along since the 90s. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Kye 3y ago
>> "All the music genres froze in place and that was that." Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're saying music hasn't evolved any since the late 1990s. There is an incredible blending of rap, breakbeats, punk, metal, and rock happening as we speak. And that's just the last few years. Places like Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and Beatport are rich with new kinds of music and new takes on the past. Even Soundcloud is still holding on in its bot takeover era. 1996 was the year before MP3.com. Napster two years later.
- FreeFull 3y ago
  On the other hand, how much of that is actually making it into the mainstream? Although, it's debatable how much of a "mainstream" there even is, any more.
- ebiester 3y ago
  It's speaking with respect to radio. It's why you wonder who is listening to Ed Sheeran and Imagine Dragons but they're somehow so popular.
- 3y ago

boredumb 3y ago

Now that some form of natural and somewhat enjoyable entertainment emerges it was only a matter of time before it inevitably became massively commercialized and brought under the big tent of neutered entertainment "advertiser friendly content"

jszymborski 3y ago

Why aren't producer-owned podcast co-ops more of a thing? Such co-ops could sell their own ad spots, pool funds to promote network shows, manage a subscription service, pay-out dividends, etc...

Macha 3y ago
Aren't they? Most of the podcasts I listen to seem to be this model (Relay FM, various tabletop podcasts)
- jszymborski 3y ago
  They serve the same function, but are they a producer-owned model? That helps a lot towards acrimonious acquisitions like what happened between Gimlet and Spotify.