The Industry Correction and Future

You're listening twentyw thousand cats The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds I'm Dallas Taylor Dallas I've told this story before This is the first time I'm telling it to the person who is in the story I would love to hear it. This is my friend Seaan Hi, I'm Seaan Michael Cologonene. I'm a director and an audio engineer and a filmmaker. Sean recently made a documentary about podcasting called Age of Audio How did age of audio come to be? likeike how'd you get the idea I was working on one of the potential follow up documentaries to my first documentary and it was about this band called A Wilhelm Scream And anyone who's a longtime fan of twenty thousandousand Hertz knows that there's an episode on the sound of Wilhelm Scream. The Charge at Feather River was the film that gave Wilhelm its name, but it was the second film it was used in What was the first? And because I wanted to include where the history of that sound came from, I reached out to this podcast host named Dallas Taylor to see if he would do an interview with me about this particular sound as an expert, if you will. And just prior to meeeting up with Well, you I ended up hanging out with Ira Glass at a punk rock show in Brooklyn From WBEC Chicago, It's this American L. I'm Ira Glass Our program today in three As And after our interview, we got to talking and I told you the story about how I hung out with Ira Glass at a punk rock show. And also that Roman Mars had done quote on my previous documentary. This is ninety nine percent invisible I'm Roman Mars. And you said something along the lines of You know Roman Mars And now you seem to know Ira Glass Why don't you do a podcast documentary hopefully I did not ruin your life in that, but it's a very good documentary. Yeah, you did, but it's okay. You set me upon a path And from the time you mentioned it to the time we were filming, I think it was about Three, four months But I appreciate our friendship, Dallas, and I do appreciate you and also scorn you for giving me that idea Age of Audio is the best presentation of the strange and surprising history of podcasting that I've ever seen. It's full of insights from podcast icons and unsung heroes. And it's narrated by a great podcaster named Ronald Young Jr., who hosts a show called Wait for it After I saw the film, I asked Sean if we could adapt it into a shorter audio only version for our show, and thankfully, he agreed So without further ado, this is Age of Audio for audio Long before you know, television, Film, radio. printed word. we've been communicating with each other in sound It's elemental to who we are Welcome welcome, welcome to Armchare experpert. I'm Dan Rather and I' joined by Hey there. welcome to C Brian Nes a Friend. Joined as always by Son. is that everybody and welcome to the AllMBA show, P It's an exam. The doctor can take that up everybody all over the world Millions of people are talking into microphones about anything and everything They all believe they have something to say worth listening to, wor listening. And they're right because half a billion people are listening The world is listening to podcasts. This is theoe exper.ow one million dollars. If you want to ask few. There's no bud, no forensics, no admission life, wine I just want to sayve with you and it r my blood right When you think of a podcast, you might think of two people sitting around a table talking into microphones, or you might think of the crafted emotional narratives of shows like This American Life. Of course, podcasts are both of those things, and more And since you're hearing this, you're one of the world's five hundred eighty four million regular podcast listeners. You might even know someone who's made a podcast This is a story about those people Some you know. Others you haven't met yet We're all on a journey to make it and podcasting today What does it mean to make it in podcasting today? Is it even possible? is this industry? To try to make sense of it to go back to the beginning I'm Ronald Young Junror And this is Age of Audio In many ways, the story of podcasting is a story about technology Well, my name is Adam Curry. Adam Curry got his break as a video DJ or VJ on MTV in the late nineteen eighties.orning everybody, It's Adam Curry here with you and of course all your favorite music and more is on the way. I am known as the co inventor of podcasting. Let me go back to the beginning because actually the technology of podcasting was invented in two thousand. So before anyone was podcasting, before there was an iPod, interestingly, I was working with Dave Weiner. Dave Weiner is a software engineer who helped create the tools that made blogging possible By the time We were getting to podcasting. We had already created blogging And he hadnt created this RSS syndication forat RSS stands for really simple syndication. Syndication is a fancy word for broad distribution, like when a TV show is played on lots of stations, or like when the associated press writes an article and lots of newspapers run it. Before podcasts, people used RSS feeds to get automatic updates from websites Instead of visiting a site to check for new stuff, you could subscribe to its RSS feed and get notified whenever a new post went up. This worked great for text based sites like blogs and news sources, but audio and video were trickier point in time, the internet was much slower than it is today. Nobody's going to sit there and wait for three seconds of audio for five minutes. That's Dave Weiner again, the inventor of RSS. Adam Curry came to Dave with an idea for how to tweak RSS to handle audio. I had this famous meeting with Adam Curry. The idea that he had and it was a brilliant idea is that you could time shift it Basically, you could set it to download overnight so that by morning, your audio was ready to play. Itew to be looking for a new program If it was there, it would say, oh, it would download it, put it on my hard drive, and then would say, I have something new You don't find out that the audio has been downloaded until it's already on your machine This moment is huge if you think about it It's before Twitter, pre YouTube, there's no Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok. It's a profound shift, culturally and historically At first, no one really got it. I thought we'd just put it out there and then they would start doing the podcasts. It doesn't happen like that. Three and a half years ago by It's now summer two thousand four. I had been on Adam's case the whole time. Adam, why aren't you doing one of these things And so he makes it's the daily source code. Adam was one of the first people to make what was basically a radio show, but for the internet Th started to pick up after that. And then there was Don and Drew and Dave Slusher. Hello friends and neighbors. This is Dave Slusher. This is the evvil genenius Chronicles on and on Boom, boom, boom, boom This newly created system was perfect for those early internet hosts. They would have never been picked up for broadcast radio shows. Their listening audiences were specific, small Who needs a radio station anymore All you need is a laptop blue microphone that cost you two hundred dollars. That's Chris Bannon, who's worked in the industry for decades. You can throw a blanket over your head and create a show and for a brief period in the ots and the early teens, you might start a show in your living room that would have a million listeners. Soon, radio shows wanted in on the action. They started publishing their episodes via RSS. Here's radio lab's creator, Jad Abumroad. I remember on the media. this is on the media on Brooke Gladstone. It was one of the first shows to do that and suddenly, they were like, Ohh my God, we just got fifty thousand people downloading our show. What just happened To take these episodes on the go, most people used an iPod, which is where the word podcast comes from. It's a combination of iPod and broadcasting This term wasn't coined by Apple. I'm Ben Hammersley and I do many things, but mostly I'm the person who invented the word podcast In two thousand four, Ben was a writer for the Guardian newewspaper in the UK And at the time, the newspaper was paper centric, which meant that all of the deadlines were for the print presses to run. And I'd written this article about this sort of emerging idea of downloadable audio content that was automatically downloaded because of an RSS feed. I'd submitted the article on time, but then I got a phone call from my editor about fifteen minutes before the presses were due to roll saying Hey, u The piece is about a sentence short for the shape of the page We don't have time to move the page around. Can you just write us another sentence And so I just made up a sentence which It says something like, but what do we call this phenomenon? And then I made up some silly words. It went out, it went into the articles, I didn't think any moreore of it. And then about six months later or so, I got an email from the Oxford American Dictionary saying Hey Where did you get that word from that was in the article you wrote It seems to be the first citation of the word Podcast Now here we are almost twenty years later And it became part of the discourse What happened next would seal the deal for the name and the medium Here's Adam Curry And then I got a call from Apple. Steve wants to meet with you. Do you have any time? Meaning Steve Jobs, the famous Apple CEO. He invited me to D three conference where he was on stage. and he sits down and he says, I want to put podcasting into iTunes. Is that okay Yeah At this point, Apple could have tried to make this technology the exclusive property of Apple They didn't do that Instead, they decided to take advantage of all this free content to draw folks closer to their Apple devices. And they didn't worry too much about the fact that you could listen to podcasts lots of different ways Part of the DNA of podcasting is that The user has a choice of how they listen to it They're just listening to it wherever they feel like listening to. There's hardly any podcasts that say, you know, go listen to this at Apple, go listen to this at Google, whatever. They say wherever you get your podcast, Whver get your podcast, wherever you get your podcastsisten to p. Wherever you get your podver you get your podver get your podcast Wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that is beautiful about podcasting is that it is in some ways The last vestige of The idealism of the internet. That's Jesse Thorne, founder of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. It's about connecting people with each other It's about something that almost anyone can do Gradually, more and more people started seeing the appeal of podcasting. The tech folks were the early adopters, as usual And public radio broadcasters were a natural fit But there was another very specific group of people who embraced this new outlet And that was comedians, peopleople like Mark Marin, Kevin Smith, and Ricky Gervise. You're listening to Ricky Gervaise with me, Stepven Merchin and Carl Pilkington. You're thinking, well, why are we doing a podcast? Why are we doing a podcast for for no money Is there no money None For comedians, the appeal of podcasting was the freedom to say whatever they wanted. In the United States, the FCC imposes strict penalties on folks who break community standards on the airwaves, but the FCC doesn't control the internet It also helped comedians book gigs. They could show their download numbers to comedy club managers and say, lookook how many listeners I have in your city. You should put me on the lineup But one of the most influential people in the early years of podcasting was Ira Glass, the host and main creator of this American life. H's Chad Abumrad again When I first got into radio, I mean, I got into it just as everybody my age at that time. because I wanted to make some version of this American life. J'must gonna chill out with a little this American life Please welcome Ira Glass. W the easy Chicago. It's this American life, I'm Iira Glass. Stay with us Before this American life, NPR shows tended to be dry and unemotional, just stating the facts. President Elect Reagan met with running mate George Bush and other top advisors today to plan their transition to power The stories in this American life were full of emotion, with character arcs and unexpected twists and turns. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this whole story is how little our memories have deceived us about each other even if they had deceived us about ourselves So where did Ira get the idea to produce stories like this? A lot of it goes back to the writer and radio performer Joe Frank. For decades, Joe produced fictional radio stories that were absurd, beautiful, and philosophical all at once. An orchestra dressed in white tuxedos played on the proscenium stage at one end of the room Wh above the dance floor a disco ball with little reflective mirrors turned slowly Throwing off a splash of moving snowflake lights throughout the entire ballroom Early in Irra's radio career, he worked with Joe at NPR. I was assigned as his production system. I would sit in the studio as see would record it. and then we would skimming across the top of the water. harbor and the hotel receding into the distance I remember just standing there in the old MPR office on M Street recording on real to real tape, and Joe' in the studio like performing his script. And as my hands began to tremble and my eyes welled up with tears. Dr. Rard removed his stethoscope from his leather bag. I remember just thinking like, he's telling this story and I just felt so like caught up in it. And then when I started to make stories, like I wanted to do that, but I wanted the stories to be true I wanted to be like real people talking about real stuff and just figuring out how to do that just took me years This American life started as a radio show. We've been on the air since nineteen ninety five. when it started, podcasting wasn't happening at all. I found the funding myself and did it with WBEZ in Chicago, which is where I was living from WBEZ in the glorious city of Chicago, Illinois I'm a and see from your MC Iiglass Here's Julie Snyder, who is this American Life's editor and senior producer you know, the early years of the show was just trying to figure it out. And then we started doing live shows. then we did the TV show. You know, we started talking about doing a television show We knew we wanted to do something that would keep the feeling of the radio show experimented a lot. As soon as it was possible to put the show up on the interternet, we put it up on the internet. And then gradually grew and grew and grew until podcast audienceces is larger than the radio audience As this American life became a hit podcast, Ira Glass became one of the medium's first celebrities, and the style of storytelling that he pioneered inspired countless others, like Avery Truffelman. She was a producer at ninety nine percent Invisible who now hosts the show, Articles of Interest. I feel like a lot of us are just following the rules that Irara Glass set from literally the way we all open our shows. This is blah blah, blah, I'm blah blah blah Like doing it in separate acts, like the way we collect room tone, the hesitant like thoughtful way we ask our questions, the earnest yet unctious tone. And while Ira may have set the tone in front of the mic, behind the scenes, there was a whole team of folks who deserve credit for fueling the success of this American life. Here's Emmanuel Joi a co host of Serial and Reply All I think we talk about like IRA being like a blueprint for a lot of people, and he totally is There's a blueprint for hosts, and then there's a blueprint for everybody else. And I feel like a blueprint for everybody else, especially editors in this business, for narrative podcasting is Julie. Like Julie Snyder is the person that I feel like every editor I've met like wants to be. Julie Snyder. She's a major character in the history of podcasting Gotta start at this American life I was really Fun. And driven, it was all about the show It was so important. It just felt like I lived and breathed the show and learning how to do it and the stories. That was all of our lives. That's what the other producers on the show did. It felt exciting. It felt like being like kind of part of something larger And Julie Snyder would be a driving force behind cereal Even if you know nothing about podcasts You still probably heard about cereal. I think it's important to understand that Sirial's success came nineteen years after the first episode of this American lifeife. From this American Life in WBEC Chicago, it's Sirial. One story told week by week I'm Sarah Kanig Serial has become the most downloaded podcast in ITunes's history. I was up until four last night listening to this new podcast called Sial. I did listen to Sial thing that was new that we didn't know if anybody could do was we didn't know if anybody would stick around for a story that lasted more than one episode Like in radio broadcasting and in podcasting, everything always ended after an hour. And so the question with serial and the science project of it was Can you make something that has kind of the stickiness? of like a television show that you would binge watch You know, would people stay with it the way they watch those shows? It turned out, the answer was a resounding yes. Within six months, Cereial had been downloaded over eighty million times, and it helped kickstart the true crime podcast craze that's still huge today. O next guest is the host of the wildly popular Cereial podcast, please welcome Sarah Kanig What is it like to be big time in podcasting? Is it all just golden microphones and diamond studded water bottles and pyro glass, get my coffee What is it? Favorite thing is that my neighbor in Pennsylvania calls me big time now. Oh yeah. I You are big time. You are big time. Cereal got so big, it was even parodied on SNL in a sketch about investigating the mystery of Chris Kringle Maybe there are people out there who claim they've seen Chris leave lots of presents Maybe they've written him letters. Maybe they've sat on his lap And then there's the Nishaal. This was the moment that podcasts really exploded into the mainstream. To be fair, like it wasn't just serial. Apple came out with a version of its OS on the iPhone that included a podcast app And that happened a month or two before Cereio dropped, just coincidentally. They had this thing like right there, It was like podcasts. they could push it and then it would just list the top podcast. And sure, now anyone could have a podcast. But for a narrative show Something in the style of this American life. it's not fast and it's not easy Honestly It takes money. And not everyone has that Sometimes you could find folks willing to put up some cash. After the break, Roman Mars builds the indie record label of podcasts, Mark Marin interviews the president, and then The podcasting bubble bursts Heat up your fourourth of July at the Home Depot with our wide variety of grills under three hundred dollars and make every gathering one to remember. Give your outdoor space a glow up. Whatever your budget is, with savings on seasonal plants starting at five dollars. With the grill fired up and your backyard set to perfection, you'll be able to invite friends and family over to kick off the party Start celebrating with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Prices may vary by stor exions of pricey Home Depot com sl priceatch for details Congratulations to David Clark for getting last episode's Mystery Sound right That's the drum fill at the start of the East Enders theme song. It's a BBC soap opera that's been running continuously since nineteen eighty five and now has over seven thousand three hundred episodes. These little drum hits are known by fans as the Duffuffs or doofdoofs. They're used for cliffhanger moments at the end of episodes, usually right after a character says or does something shocking Marry me And here's this episode's Mystery Sound If you know that sound, tell us at the web address mystery. twenty k dot orgot Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft twenty thousand Htz t shirt Reliable communication is fundamental to any business, because when you have missed calls or follow ups that never happen, those are missed opportunities that could have led to more success. 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Sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shhopify dot com slash twenty k Go to shopify dot com slash two zero k. that's shhopify dot com slash twenty k From the beginning of twenty thousand Hertz, my biggest influence was ninety nine percent Invisible, because in many ways, ninety nine PI laid the groundwork for how to make it as an indDie podcast, from storytelling techniques to how you monetize and promote your show. And that goes back to the show's creator and host, Roman Mars. This is ninety nine percent invisible. I'm Roman Mars I had worked in public radio since two thousand one And I worked on every type of public radio show that has ever existed. The model for public radio funding is They put on the shows, they do fledge tribes to pay for the shows. The producers were usually the last people to get paid in that system Here's Avery Truffleman, one of ninety nine PI's first full time producers. There's this old world, right? where the expectation I was raised with was like, you will toil an obscurity for years. You will be paid nothing and you won't matter. Maybe in a few years, you will help a very interesting host make a show. If you're lucky to get a job at all. that was really somethingomething that I hated about the public radio system. Roman imagined something better, something like an indie record label, but for podcasts. In his vision, creators would retain control over what they make, but would support each other and grow their audiences together Okay, imagine how dreamy this would be, right? Like one of your favorite bands asks you to join. And they're like, oh, by the way, we're incorporating all your other favorite bands and now you're all gonna party together. In twenty fourteen, independent producer Roman Mars officially launched radiotopia. From PRX's Radiopia, this is Radioiaries. I'm Joe Richmond. You're listening to Song ExplodE, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. We're a proud member of radiootopia from PRX collollection of the best shows around. Fundamentally the shows in radiotopia, they're just fun to listen to, but I think they also represent the best of podcasting as an art form I just believe that you should live life betting on yourself And ownership is the Ultimate betting on yourself One of the creators Roman recruited early was Caitlin Prest, who launched the Heart podcast in twenty fourteen Radiotopia gave us twenty five thousand dollars as a starter bump, That's it twenty five thousand dollars doesn't go very far when you have a staff of people to pay. But the biggest incentive for joining radiotopia wasn't the immediate money. It was the connection with the other shows in their network. Because of the association with the big shows on that network, our audience Doubled. that allowed us to make money All I wanted for this whole thing was for bunch of people paid well to do a good job creating something that people cared about I want to make sure that people who made the thing got paid first instead of the administrators who madeade the station run All these things were all about me trying to correct all these issues I had. withith my experience inside of public radio I'm really looking for the people who want to run their own thing and own their own thing and remain independent. We are a collection of independents There's fewer of those people who actually even want that. That's what I've found More and more people really want a job. A network sounds very professional, but for a lot of indie producers, you have to understand, things might be pretty DIY. recording in your garage, for example, like comedian Mark Marin Here's producer, Brendon McDonald explaining the origins of the show that he and Mark Marin created, which is called WTF. Mark came to me summer of two thousand nine. and said to me Hey, what do you know about podcasts? He said it like it was a thing that he had just heard the day before. I don't even know what this is. Like because podcasting was so weird, it was the Wild West. g! All right, let's do this. How are you, folks It's me Mark. It's this DIY thing that this guy, this comedian there in the outskirts of Los Angeles does from his garage was toward the end of twenty fourteen An email came in to the site that was from the White House, Whitehouse. gov email address pitch was to have Vice President Joe Biden on the show And I had no interest in it That's Mark. You know, we had very carefully Put politics aside So we were not a political show. And in my mind to bring the vice president on It was like, why would we do that But a sitting president' a different thing is a president of the United States So you know, there was some interest that came out of Obama's camp. We got this phone call saying, we'd like to do your show So that means have Pident go to the garage. Well, that's ridiculous That's not going to happen But it did happen At the time, it seemed both absolutely bonkers and like a major turning point in the medium Sure, today, a president on a podcast might not sound so odd, but you have to understand, this was almost a decade before the podcast election. I remember asking the president, you know, are you nervous? No, I wasn't. Okay, well, that's good. That That would be a problem. It would be a problem if the president was feeling stressed about garagearage If Sereial was the breakout moment for narrative podcasts, then this was the breakout moment for interview podcasts. The president had decided that Mark's audience was worth talking to. and for other public figures, it showed that appearing on a hit podcast could be just as valuable as going on sixty minutes or a late night show It was a great moment, but After it, it was right back to work He just kept doing the show. But we were aware of the impact on our profile, but also on podcasting. Watershed moments like these help convince advertisers to invest in podcasting. And the thing that podcast sponsors want the most is a personal endorsement from the show's host Here's Dan Granger, CEO of the podcast ad agency, Oxford Road When I worked in terrestrial radio If you wanted a celebrity to endorse your company Even if they were a local radio host, you might sign a half a million dollar contract and pay a talent fee and be locked in for six to twelve months. Podcasting meant you could get an endorsement from Alec Baldwin for free as part of your ten thousand dollars ad buy That's because Alec Baldwin hosts his own podcast that you can buy ads on. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Th. As audiences grew One enterprising public radio journalist made a well timed bet on the medium. I'm Alex Bloomberg. and for a long time, I was a producer at the public R radio show This American Life, and also the co creator of a podcast called Planet Money I decided to take what I learned from reporting on other people's businesses and start my own business. Here's Ira Glass. He's a great producer and he started here. You know, our show runs like a boutique. Like we only do stuff that we're like super invested in and very excited about. Whereas his idea was like, let's make a mass market product. The idea of Kimwood is, you know basically create an army of people who know how to do this and then make a ton of shows and then some of them will be head and some of them you'll kill. and Just treat it the way a movie studio would In fall of twenty fourteen, the startup podcast documented the creation of the podcast studio, Gimlt A month later, cereal came out. adcasting had broken through. Then, Gimlet launched the hit show Reply All, which was created by PJ Vote and Alex Goldman. From Gimlet, this is Reply All I'm P.J Ve ReplyL's success helped Gimlet fun shows like Crime Town, Heavyweight, Science Vverses, and more peopleeople started calling the studio the HBO of podcasts. Investors took notice A bunch of networks and production companies sprung up and Hollywood came calling When IHart Media spent fifty five million dollars in twenty eighteen to purchase Stuff Media, the how Stuff Works Network That was the first domino. You started seeing deal after deal where large media companies started purchasing these podcast up startarts In the span of a year, Spotify bought three podcast networks, Gimlet, Parcast, and the Ringer for a combined price of about half a billion dollars. In twenty twenty, Amazon bought Wondery Studios for three hundred million And SiriusXM bought the podcast app Stitcher for three hundred twenty five millionars. Things were really heating up. Then it all came to a screeching halt Illinois and Ohio closing all bars and restaurants beginning tonight. California shutting down bars and wineries and asking those sixty five and older to self isolate. At first when the pandemic hit, everybody froze. A few months go by and all of a sudden they look at the ratings and they see, hey, wait a minute, we're up. People have more time on their hands And they're listening more. And you literally had millions of amateurs creating their own shows. Everybody became a podcaster So these corporations started investing even more B by twenty twenty one, the ad revenue made by podcasts was around one point five billion dollars. The fact that there's money there is like having all these like weird peopleople stepping into the space justust trying stuff. And so for me, like I feel very amused by the money that's there. There's like a bunch that were like really amazing. Just like there's a bunch of TV shows that are really amazing. And then most of it's like He or bad. I think Mat is good for podcasting. That means more shows will get made, more voices will be heard. That's Eron Lopez, founder of one of the biggest podcast networks, Wondery from money Uually you get more listeners and more creators coming to any one meing. I think that can only be a good thing. It really races the stakes for everyone in the industry, both the platforms as well as the publishers But there were side effects to this injection of cash, particularly for the employees at these networks who now had corporate bosses. Here are a few of them. There was a lot of big money flying Always flying over the heads of the people who actually made the stuff. As things started to grow, like as the company started to grow, it felt that that growth was prioritized It's really hard to keep humanity at the center of it, I think, when you scale. So you start to notice that And you start to notice there's promises to help build audience. There's promises to help sell your show. There's promises for marketing resources. You're just like, okay, like we got to hit like the next metric and the next metric. The big companies with the big dollar say, Hey, welcome, keep doing what you're doing. We're gonna to put a jet pack on your back and blast you the mood. just keep doing you're doing.'re gonna grow And then it never came People were starting to see cracks in the podcasting boom. And some creators started thinking that it might have been better to stay independent Here's Roman Mars It's not just that I have an ethic That's about independence. The offers aren't good enough for it to matter When a company with money is interested in you, They're not interested in you And they're not even interested in what you create They're interested in your audience And you can sell that audience exactly once You remember Sirriel They make that business model work People were saying to me, they really want to diversify. You guys might want to think about doing subscriptions or doing like a Patreon kind of thing. And don just like every part of it really stressed me out For many small podcasts, including ours, direct listener support is a real lifeline. In July of twenty twenty, the serial team had decided to exchange independence for. twenty five million dollars from the New York Times I don't have to run cereal anymore, which is very nice And the folks who made cereal were not the only ones cashing in. I'm Roman Mars. I'm still the creator and host of ninety nine percent Invisible. It's just that I don't own ninety nine percent of visible anymore That's right, even ninety nine percent invisible went corporate. In twenty twenty one, Roman left radiotopia behind and sold his show to Stitcher, which is owned by SiriusXM So for the first time in my years since I worked at WEE in Chicago in the early two thousands I'm like an employee of a company My thinking hasn't evolved all that much and I know that might sound surprising. The part of independence that I value is The ability to do what you want, how you want to do it. and I still believe in all of it. It just so happened that for me personally, as a person who ran a single show called ninety nine percent of Visible I was done with figuring out How to make money in podcasting. It didn't tive me joy anymore Here's Rishi Kish Hirwei, host of the radiotopia show Song Exploder I think the thing that was hardest about that was that Roman was the person who brought me in to radiootopia. The fact was Most of us were there because of a personal relationship that we had with him. and I think his enthusiasm for the idea of what the network was was such an important part. It felt like u the hub of the wheel was going to be going away, but that felt and you know maybe potentially destabilizing Things were about to change for the entire industry. Pretty soon, these big corporations figured out what indie podcasters had always known. Making a hit podcast is really hard. These shows weren't growing the way they expected them to. And once they crunched the numbers, they realized they weren't seeing a return on their investments. And suddenly, this thriving business opportunity came to an abrupt end It was like someone switched on the overheadlights at the club. The party was over. What came next were mass layoffs. Spotify laid off over four hundred podcast employees and dissolved the Gimlet network, absorbing it into Spotify stududios. SiriusXM laid off four hundred seventy five workers and shut down the Stitcher app Amazon cut one hundred and ten jobs from its Wondery network and folded their narrative shows into Audible. and NPR cut ten percent of its staff, citing a slowdown in advertising and corporate sponsorship. After years of podcasting being the hottest new thing, investors sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into it. Sobering up was painful In the years since, most of the ad money has been funneled into chit chat podcasts hosted by celebrities, because they're cheap to produce and they come with some degree of built in audience. Hey everyone, I'm Amy Poher and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. And this is my new podcast, Conan O'Brien needs a friend. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Oprah podcast of so glad to be here with you. And these days, shows like these all include video. Here's Dan Granger again All anybody talks about in podcasting today is video It's YouTube, YouTube, YouTube And things that you used to see, long form audio driven content, the theater of the mind that's been totally deprioritized bigig investigative pieces like they used to do aren't getting the same capital that they were because everybody just wants to see on a screen if they're financing the deal. Here's indie podcaster John DLore describing these changes. They call it a correction, a bubble bursting, whatever. There's always been problems of how to monetize. and there's always been the issue of like Big show gets the attention gets the ad sales. The younger show has to fight to get resources And so that predates bigig podcasts That problem, you know, So you can't put all of that at the feet of the podcast industrial complex, as I call it. But then when you have a misalignment of Cate a vision on top of that. That's when things start to feel. Really really not good. It just got too big too fast. So what does this all mean for folks trying to make it in podcasting today? With so many podcasts is success. After collecting all of this material for Age of Audio, Sean, the documentary's director, has a unique insight into the present and possible future of podcasting And of course, as someone who's been making this podcast for nearly ten years, I have my own thoughts and strong feelings about it. In my conversation with Sean, we dove deep into our hopes, fears, and predictions for the podcast industry, and what all of this means for twenty thousand Hz. That's all coming up Next time