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Photo: Vulture; Photo: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection, Nicholas Cocobris/NurPhoto via Getty Images
After a hellish year for the podcast world, many are looking for a fresh start in the new year. But such hopes feel precarious given how the rest of the media business is barely making it through January.Nevertheless, it teeth As we enter a new year, the podcast ecosystem must grapple with some very big questions: what it is and what it will become. Below are the key threads of how I’m thinking about the coming months, from YouTube to artificial intelligence to whether we’ll see more alternatives to the big podcasting model that defined the past five years. Some of them.
This is a question that has come up in almost every conversation I’ve had with people on the podcast since the beginning of January, and of course it’s completely to be expected. The past year has been full of bad news, and everyone is looking for a fresh start. The tricky answer is, “It depends.” In a sense, there is a limit to how much the level of the podcast world as a whole can decline, and after my results, which summarized the sentiment responses from the survey, came out, several people wrote to me (not necessarily). (although most were private), we were able to find examples of podcast companies and, if we looked hard enough, some publishers actually improved in the past year. (Talk House was the only store that agreed to go on the record about this.) When approaching this question, I think along her two lines. Will there be more layoffs? And will business be as difficult this year as it was last year for most creators, shows, and publishers? The second question can be further broken down. Because there’s a stability difference between an ad-driven operation (well, most of it) and a direct support-driven operation. In that regard, we’re already starting to hear optimism about the former. The latter, on the other hand, has always been relatively stable.
In terms of layoffs, I don’t think there are more layoffs yet to come. First, Audacy just filed for bankruptcy and some restructuring is likely. But in general, the layoff issue applies equally to broader media, technology and entertainment businesses, which often have significant podcasting divisions. This year didn’t get off to a great start. After flipping through the calendar, I noticed that sports illustrated‘s parent company has laid off “a significant number, perhaps all” of its employees, putting the very existence of the storied but long-defunct publication in jeopardy.Condé Nast unveils folding pitchfork into the GQ, sparking a wave of layoffs there and indicating the site’s likely demise as a destination for music reviews.and ross Angeles times Drifting deeper and deeper into the chaos. Other job cuts were made at Universal Music, Hallmark Media, Paramount Global, Amazon’s MGM Studios and Prime Video. Despite a particularly strong 2023, more waves are coming to the video game industry: Riot, Unity, Amazon’s Twitch, Discord. That’s only big companies. Gaming site Kotaku has compiled an updated list, and in the headline he points out that nearly 4,000 layoffs are hitting the industry, and it’s not even February yet. Do you think technology is safe? Not very much. Amazon itself, TikTok, and in the near future Meta, his Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and YouTube, the new big frontier for podcasts.
Speaking of which, that’s another thing everyone wants to talk about. “Should I do YouTube?” “Am I leaving my audience and money on the table?” “Is it appropriate for what I’m making?”
Behind this is a growing debate that reframes podcasting’s historical identity as an open distribution technology primarily associated with audio content. These days, it seems like the rise of YouTube has finally usurped most video creation activities, increasing the participation of his creators in podcasts.
Here’s my card. I’m still not entirely sure what to think about YouTube as a whole from a podcasting perspective. As you can probably tell, I’ve been writing about podcasting as an audio-first ecosystem, but to the extent that I’ve worked on YouTube threads, I see it as a trend among audio creators. diversify into the YouTube as an extension distribution point or complementary extension. I have to point out that this is something of a reversal or evening of a trend that first appeared several years ago. That’s when more and more YouTube creators diversified into podcasting in search of a more stable and less algorithmic branch of the business. More whimsical than YouTube. Anyway, even though I’ve been keeping an eye on the reports and studies that keep coming out to shed more light on listener behavior and YouTube, I’m often left with the feeling that I don’t really know what I’m watching. . Am I old already? hard? washed? Does it not work with my mental model? probably.
Regardless, the challenge for podcast creators moving onto YouTube lies in the fact that they have to play the YouTube game. Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm. Does the image thumbnail have a provocative face? An excited face? A surprised face? “Don’t do that!” “Worst movie ever made.” It’s a brave old new world.
I’d love to say this year is all about sustainability, but that’s not quite accurate. Rather, it feels like the goal is simply autonomy. Can teams create, succeed, and fail on their own terms, rather than having their fates purely dictated by entities outside of their control?
In that regard, given everything that happened last year, 2023 will bring strong skepticism towards large ad-driven podcast publishers and towards alternative models, particularly the worker cooperative structures practiced by Maximum Fun and Defector Media. It ended with a surge of enthusiasm. I’m pretty confident that at least a few teams will carry on that enthusiasm, and I look forward to seeing what kind of new shows and talent those ventures will support.
News of Pitchfork’s demise sparked widespread discussion about the types of media operations that are possible these days.It can be very big like New York. times, or you can be a sustainable and profitable small business like Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack, but you can’t be in between anymore. This mirrors much of what we’ve seen in other media fields, such as movies and video games, and this is the death of the “middle class” and why that middle class media is culturally important. This leads to further ruminations about what is going on. “The middle class can be more specific, weirder, and experimental than popular publications, and more ambitious, reported, and considered than smaller players,” says Ezra Klein. writes in her own elegy to Pitchfork. “Many great journalists are discovered and trained in the middle. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is created rather than discovered.”
It seems to me that co-op shops like MaxFun and Defector, which deliver on the total value of groups, are a model in between.
Yes, yes, it’s shiny new at the moment. But the shadow of artificial intelligence looms over all creative work, and podcasting is no exception. Just as squeezed media companies are looking for ways to automate (and dehumanize) aspects of journalism into products, for example, the podcast industry as a whole will begin a similar process. We already know one big example. Last fall, Spotify began piloting an effort to use AI tools to “scale out” its podcasts into different languages, stumbling through ideas for its future. Whether it’s actually fun to listen to or effective remains to be seen. Yesterday, Digiday published a report on how other major podcast publishers are thinking about these tools as a way to drive other aspects of their business, such as production support, sales processes, and “commercial message creation.” . This seems to mean using AI-generated voices to read ads.
Say the quiet parts out loud. So much of this AI talk is corporate nonsense. A little spin or something to get investors excited. One of the challenges in navigating this thread is identifying what is actually important and what is just performance mumbo jumbo. Spotify is pivoting away from editor-curated playlists to algorithm-driven listening, and I’ve been receiving a series of notable pitches landing in my inbox about how they’re creatively “integrating” AI into all things podcasting. It’s like we’re featuring a true crime show with a full AI co-host, whatever that means.
I’m still thinking about the interview Who?weekly‘s Lindsay Webber and Bobby Finger talked about the AI stunt earlier this month. At this point, it’s hard to imagine the use of AI becoming anything more than prop comedy in the context of podcasting. However, technology is advancing rapidly.
This is the most relevant and eternal question for me. Fun facts about this:
➽ 2024 will be crazy news for a simple reason. It’s an election. A ton of publishers, podcasters, and news organizations (to the extent that they remain) will be joining the category, and it will naturally attract a ton of new and old audiences — and, of course, seemingly shunned ones. Redux (unless it’s Biden vs. Trump, where it won’t happen) will likely result in more people being focused than participating. But this is not just a US story. More than 60 countries, representing more than half of the world’s population, will vote in what will be the largest election year in history. (A Vox article on the subject has the chilling subtitle, “Can democracy survive?”) I haven’t seen a ton of reliable global listening data, but… This year will be an interesting year to focus on that. metric.
➽ The difficult state of narrative podcasts, not to mention limited edition series, has been talked about a lot here and elsewhere, and remains a topic of great interest to me.
➽ Related to the YouTube section above, I wonder to what extent established audio publishers will begin to design their shows with dual purpose audio and video, and how that will shape the aesthetic of most of the work we produce going forward. I am interested in how it will be shaped.
➽ Fields I would like to delve deeper into this year: actual theater, Canadian stuff, and more esoteric fields. The other day, an acquaintance told me, beer and brewing Since then, I’ve learned about the nuances of cooling equipment in beer production.
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