The 'Disneyfication' of podcasts (no, this isn't a fairytale)
Plus: white parenthood in Brooklyn public schools, and caste discrimination in the USA
Welcome to the first installment of Podspotting! Hopefully, this won’t be a total waste of eight minutes of your time. Scroll down for my recommendations of the week.
Cover story: The ‘Disneyfication’ of podcasts/Should we start eulogising the podcast as we know it?
Last week, Deutsche Welle wrote that “podcasting is finally big business.” I feel like it has already been big business for some time now, but two examples cited by DW (Joe Rogan’s Spotify deal and New York Times’ acquisition of Serial) certainly support the argument that podcasts and big money are intersecting way more. Here’s how I would visualise it:
Let’s get into some details that support the idea that podcasts are getting even bigger than they were a year ago:
Joe Rogan, the creator of the wildly popular eponymous podcast, has moved his show exclusively to Spotify for a deal of at least $100 million. The announcement gave the company’s shares a very healthy boost, indicating that people believe in the deal. The show will remain free, but only to Spotify users.
Last week also saw the first episode of another Spotify exclusive podcast, with celebrity host Michelle Obama. The first guest? Barack.
The New York Times announced that it was purchasing Serial Productions, the maker of the most-ever listened to podcast, Serial. The deal also put NYT in partnership with This American Life, the public radio show hosted by Ira Glass, who is considered the patron saint of narrative-style audio storytelling.
In July, we also learned that SiriusXM (whom I only know because of the satellite radio channels my sister used to play in her car, despite my pleas for ‘normal’ radio) is purchasing podcasting company Stitcher for a whopping $325 million.
Spotify had its earnings call last week, and questions about podcasts far exceeded those about music. Highlights from the call? Spotify has 1.5 million shows, 50% of which were announced in 2020 (thanks to the proliferation of the ‘Quarancast’ and the ‘Coronacast’). Podcast advertising, while small, was one of the stronger areas of growth in the last quarter. Founder Daniel Ek said that ‘exclusivity is a key component of the strategy, we want to create more and more original programming that only exists on Spotify.’
In an interview with Longform podcast last year, podcast expert Nick Quah said that big money moves didn’t necessarily have to signal the end of indie podcasting. If I remember correctly, his logic was something along the lines of: if you’re good, you’ll get noticed. Practical people might call all of these developments the natural next step in the evolution of a medium.
But I am not a practical person.
When they first came into existence in mid-2004 (well before the Serial boom of 2014), podcasts were considered ‘radio disrupters’. Podcasters, as Larson (2015) pointed out, “have been free to make up their own rules and to try new things in ways that public-radio journalists historically have not”. If radio (and by this, I am mostly referring to American Public Radio) is topic-driven, podcasts tend to be narrative-driven.
In 2004, when The Guardian journalist Ben Hammersley coined the term ‘podcast’, he wondered at the possibility of a “new boom in amateur radio”, and made a strong argument for the medium’s appeal. He interviewed an ex-New York Times journalist-turned-podcaster, Christopher Lydon, who marvelled the absence of pressure from editors and publishers, and the abundance of cheap resources. Lydon went on to say that this “is something that newspapers can only dream about…they all have an institutional envy of this.” Writing in 2006, podcast scholar Richard Berry suggested that the podcast was a grassroots level platform that would pose a significant challenge to the mainstream.
The post-2014 boom in podcasting (which many people have attributed to the large-scale success of the true-crime show Serial) has seen a shift towards the mainstream. And today, podcasts are very mainstream. You can make a living as a podcaster, there are new jobs opening up in mainstream media companies, and a lot more people are listening to podcasts than ever before, which means that advertising is bringing in more dollars. This month, Spotify launched its own podcast called For the Record, and the second episode is about, you guessed it, podcasts (or ‘the medium of the moment’).
Over the past year or so, I’ve also noticed that podcasts are becoming sleeker and shinier. Let’s take The New York Times, for example. When journalist Rukmini Callimachi’s story about the fall of Mosul was made into a podcast series called Caliphate in 2018, it felt like…well, a podcast. It was gritty and slightly rough around the edges. Fast-forward to 2019 when NYT’s Ellen Barry narrated a three-part podcast series based on her wildly-popular story, The Jungle Prince of Delhi. It sounded clean, shiny and too…I don’t know…well-produced. Everything was dramatized, including a message from her office manager, old archival letters AND media headlines.
And then there’s the fact that the very mechanism through which podcasts are distributed — the RSS feed — is one of open-access. And by moving content behind paywalls and exclusivity deals, they actually don’t remain podcasts anymore. In this brilliant article, Mike Masnick argues that Joe Rogan’s and Michelle Obama’s shows can’t technically be called podcasts anymore, but ‘Spotify exclusive audio’. And that’s what I worry about when it comes to the world of podcasts. Not to romanticise the medium too much, but podcast pioneers, for the most part, were a bunch of people who were positioned outside of the mainstream (or weren’t in the mainstream anymore). Now that the mainstream is a part of the medium, will it lead to the ‘corporatisation’ of content? Will the audio narrative world become one where only a few big players flex their muscles, kind of like how Disney is in the world of film and television? That would be a damn shame.
This week’s listens:
Nice White Parents: This is the first show to be released under the NYT-Serial-This American Life banner, and it follows reporter Chana Joffe-Walt as she chronicles life at one public school in Brooklyn. There is palpable tension at the School of International Studies when an influx of white students and the creation of a new French-medium section highlight the racial divides at the school. The concept is fascinating, and even though NWP doesn’t have the same true-crimesque sense of urgency as Serial, it keeps you hooked. Especially when the parents start cat-fighting.
Caste bias in Silicon Valley — BBC Worklife India: Don’t listen if you’re looking for excellent production value, but listen if you want to hear Dalit voices speaking about caste-based discrimination among the Indian diaspora in the US. Another longer listen on caste is this episode on Amit Varma’s show, Seen and the Unseen with guest Shruti Rajagopalan.
Next week: Now that the dust has settled around the announcement that Indian podcast producer WYN Studio has secured angel funding, I’m talking to the founders to find out what their plans are. And I’d love to hear what you’re listening to/thinking about. Write to me at sindhurinan@gmail.com. Or find me on Twitter at @sindhurin