Congratulations! You made it. We’re already one month into podcasting’s doom and gloom era – 2023.
Of course, the vibe shift started a while back. You can date the first rumblings to early 2022, when Bloomberg claimed that podcasting hadn’t produced a new hit in years. That caused some consternation in the industry.
Then there were the podcasting-adjacent layoffs and show cancellations through the rest of the year – CNN, Spotify, Acast. Recently there have been even more layoffs at Spotify, Pushkin, and Vox Media, including the team behind Cover Story, one of my favourite podcasts of 2022.
Over the last few months, grim soothsayers have been popping up in the discourse to bring the mood down. Nick Quah warned 2023 could be a rough year. The Pacific Content industry forecast had some muted overtones. The Hollywood Reporter spoke of a recession era. Ashley Carman wrote about a “great podcast market correction”. Nick Hilton even said that podcasting died in 2022.
The bad vibes are so tangible they’ve even had their own mini-backlash – a VP from Spotify came out swinging on LinkedIn, insisting: “I believe there have never been more opportunities for podcast creators and startups than there are at this moment.” Is he protesting too much?
It’s an emotional time for a lot of people in the podcast space. Fear, anxiety, stress, confusion. But I think there’s a lot of related but distinct conversations happening here. And a lot of different conversations happening at the same time become noise.
So I want to break down this podcast doomerism, and get my thoughts down. As far as I can see, there are a few different strands of bad vibe intersecting here. You can roughly split this doom and gloom into three strains: MONEY, FORMAT, and GENRE.
MONEY: The “market correction”
This is the big one for the bean counters, and therefore everyone else – money. Generally speaking, people in the industry are worried that investments are not delivering the expected returns, that big spenders in the space are drying up, and that therefore there’s less money in the podcast pool. Is the podcast gold rush over? Are we all about to go broke?
Firstly, a disclaimer is that I work on the production side, so I’m not on the pointy end of contract negotiations, media spends, winning business from corporate clients, that sort of thing. That said, anecdotally, it’s true that I’ve heard of a cooling market for branded podcast commissions and ad sales. It makes total sense. We’re in an economic downturn, and usually some of the easiest costs to cut are ad and marketing spend. With a lot of the money in podcasting coming that way, the industry has been and will continue to be affected.
But a recession isn't just bad for advertising income. Over the last few years, podcasting has increasingly been the focus of big speculative spending. You could blame covid-19, in a way. Podcasting was remarkably resilient during the pandemic, a chaotic time for other media. In fact podcasting probably grew even faster due to an influx from other media – money and talent that couldn’t go elsewhere due to lockdowns and uncertainty. That coincided with a historical land grab, as Spotify and Amazon made big plays to establish themselves in podcasting, previously an uncontested domain of Apple. Meanwhile, companies like iHeart and Acast have been throwing their weight around to assert their status in the industry. In the wake of these historical events, we saw a bunch of eye-watering contracts and acquisitions, in some (many?) cases with little apparent return on investment. This is how venture capital works – a rush of hype and excitement, the money taps turned all the way on. But it’s a cycle, a pendulum of hype and bust, bull and bear. And now it’s time for the bear.
It strikes me that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way – players in the space felt good about podcasting for a while, and it was really good. Now, there’s that vibe shift, and suddenly things are not doing so well. I think, in a way, the reality follows the perception, not vice versa. A tech giant with a wad of cash to spend sees podcasting as an exciting thing, throws some money in, and makes it an exciting space to work. Then they read a few downer articles, excitement turns to fear, they yank their investment and freeze their hiring, and suddenly the party’s over and it’s time for the “market correction”.
Obviously, none of this is the fault of hard-working, talented people in podcasting who will bear the brunt of the consequences when the vibe shifts in the board rooms. I’m sure the phrase “market correction” is no consolation to someone stunned by an unexpected job loss, or their small startup failing. But in its cold, euphemistic way, I think “market correction” represents the right way to react to predictions of podcasting’s imminent financial doom. That way is this: the podcast money pie is not shrinking, it is returning to its right size.
I don’t think it’s a contradiction to believe that the podcast space has great value, and that as of 2023 it has been overvalued. Just compare some of those big-name deals with the earnings reports of the companies that made them, and the shows that came out of them. If it has a silver lining, it’s that it’s a chance to focus on building real tangible value in the industry, rather than riding up and down on waves of hype and fear. (Also we can once and for all ditch those godawful celebrity podcasts)
FORMAT: What is a podcast? And should we pivot to video?
Now to say that podcasting died last year depends on how narrow your definition of “podcasting” is. If podcasting is open, RSS-enclosed audio distribution, where small producers can reach huge audiences with a good placement on the Apple Podcasts carousel – yes, you could say that’s dead and gone.
But let’s substitute in a broader definition, one that’s effectively in common use already. “Podcasting” is just on-demand, mostly-speech audio. Whether that’s a half-hour mp3 on my podcast app of choice, a Spotify or Amazon exclusive, a filmed chat show listened to via YouTube, is up to the listener. Now, insert this new definition in, and ask yourself – is on-demand, mostly-speech audio dead or dying? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. And I haven’t seen any data to suggest it (send it my way if it exists!). What I have seen is listeners and downloads trending slowly and steadily upwards. They might access their podcasts in a different format to the tech geeks of 2006, but they’re listeners all the same, our listeners. This is the purest, realest measure for what we do – people listening to shows. If listeners were abandoning podcasts, that would be a cause for concern, if not a crisis. But when more people are listening to more podcasts – and in more ways, across more platforms – the rest is mostly just noise.
I see this strain of doom as the latest manifestation of those old podcast anxieties – discoverability and reach. “Are enough people listening to podcasts? How can I get people to listen to my show?” That sort of thing. We look enviously at the shareability of other media, the potential for explosive audience growth – RSS feeds just don’t generate huge audiences quickly like TikTokers or YouTube channels. And so, one strain of the podcast doomerism that’s spreading around is the idea that podcasting urgently needs to become video, to become more like the latest hot media. We need to be doing film shoots, not audio recordings. We need to be taking podcasts onto YouTube and TikTok, and playing by their rules. Now, I don’t hate the thinking behind this, but I have some reservations – and I definitely don’t think this anxiety over podcast formats spells the death of podcasting.
Firstly, I’m old enough to remember the pivot-to-video disaster on Facebook, and this is basically the same argument: to change what you do in deference to the opaque algorithms and analytics of tech giants (which could change overnight with no warning). Look, there have been calls for podcasting to make better use of short video platforms like YouTube and TikTok for a long time. But upending your podcasting practice to chase social media platform trends strikes me as a “fool me twice, shame on me” situation. Secondly, I’ve actually worked in video production, and it’s not a magic cure for problems of discoverability or reach or ROI. It’s a different medium, a whole new ball game. When some audio producers really get a feel for the costs and effort of producing high-quality video, I think you’ll see a lot of podcast people walk back the urgent calls to migrate over to the moving image. And if, as some people say, it’s really just as simple as “throw a static camera into the studio and film the recording” – is this really some revolutionary shift that has doomed the podcasting format as we know it?
It’s a horrible cliche, but this all reminds me of “Video Killed The Radio Star” in the 80s. The point of that little earworm was that the music video was going to revolutionize the pop charts, and all the stars who’d had hits on radio would now need to become on-camera personalities if they hoped to survive in this brave new world. I only bring this up because forty-odd years on from “Video Killed The Radio Star”, we know what happened: the music video was a revolutionary form that many artists rode to success; AND many other artists found huge audiences and had successful careers without MTV airplay at all. I wonder if there’s a lesson in there for us?
GENRE: The podcast mould is cracking
The final strand of doomerism I’ve identified is a lot vaguer and vibes-based than the other two. I’ve talked about podcasting-as-a-business, and podcasting-as-a-format. But I also want to try and articulate a vibe shift in podcasting-as-a-genre (or, as content – but I still have idealistic hangups about using that word too freely). Some of this could be thinking out loud, and there may be tangents. But as someone who works mostly on the creative side of production, it’s something that interests me. Because the way I see it, the content of podcasting is at a turning point. A hegemonic genre and style is losing its dominant position. The golden age of the prestige narrative podcast series is drawing to close.
Now, the Serial-centering origin story of the podcast boom is a cliche at this point. The show comes out in 2014, finds a huge audience, wins awards, and suddenly we have a standard for what this growing wave of podcasting can be. You know the types of shows: limited-run prestige productions; socially-worthy investigations; self-reflexive hosts; a middle-class liberal lens on the injustices of our society. Murders, scams, the American justice system. Coastal American journalists saying “here’s what you don’t know”, “...until one phone call changed everything”, “...or is it?”.
The prestige narrative podcast has been the big genre innovation of the podcast medium. Look at Serial’s various sequels and spinoffs like The Trojan Horse Affair, or similar shows like Sweet Bobby, Teacher’s Pet, In The Dark, Dirty John, Bone Valley. Prestige narrative series have precedents from outside podcasting, but their particular form and flavour is a development that’s unique to podcasting. They’ve captured headlines, transitioned to Hollywood, sparked whatever the equivalent of watercooler conversation is these days in middle-class offices. And speaking from within the industry, these are the kind of shows people hold up as benchmarks. You’ve probably heard the derisive gag, “a group of white bros is called a podcast”. Well, the counterpoint to that kind of show was the prestige narrative series – crafted, thoughtful, important.
But now, this genre form is becoming something of a trope. To explain, let me bring up a movie I recently watched on a plane, 2022’s Vengeance (it’s got BJ Novak from The Office in it). I haven’t seen industry people talk about Vengeance, which is a shame because it’s the first film or TV show that I’ve seen which depicts podcasting and actually gets it.
In the film, a selfish shallow middle-class New York journalist finds a story about a death in rural Texas. He sees it as a chance to make a broader thematic point about America, and pitches it to a fictional New Yorker mag stand-in. When they sign off, he goes on location with a Zoom recorder to investigate – learning about heartland values and sending his dispatches back to a large editorial team in an expensive open-plan Manhattan office.
There’s a few twists I won’t spoil, but Vengeance eventually resolves into an ethical critique of the style and viewpoint of these types of shows, how and why they’re made. The movie doesn’t just faithfully depict podcasting, it’s about the podcasting mode. It’s about journalism-as-entertainment, reporter-as-personality, people-as-characters, everything-as-social-metaphor. And it’s able to be about this mode because it’s that mode is now so formulaic, so tired, that’s ripe for parody.
Tired genre – and potentially risky business. Imagine a 6-episode prestige narrative season that quickly gets 100,000 downloads per episode – a very solid hit, probably enough to push it toward the top of the charts when it launches. But that show has less ad impressions to sell in a year than a niche weekly always-on show with only 12,000 downloads per episode – almost ten times fewer. In theory, the IP behind your prestige narrative could get sold in Hollywood – but on the other hand, it probably won’t. Meanwhile, the steady regular audience for that small always-on show is easier to turn into a paying subscriber base, through Patreon or subscriptions in Apple Podcasts. Then factor in that it’s probably cheaper to produce 52 episodes of a low-quality chatty weekly show than it is to investigate, write, record and mix 6 episodes of our prestige narrative series, and you can see that the numbers don’t really add up, at least if you’re looking for direct, reliable return for your investment. Thinking as a producer, I almost winced in pain listening to the final episode of The Trojan Horse Affair. Serial Productions’ big show of 2022 climaxed with the two hosts getting flown out to Perth, Australia – the most isolated major city in the world – to try, and fail, to talk to a source. Airfares, accommodation and expenses: maybe $10,000. Hours spent interviewing guest: 0. Return on investment: little to none. Unsatisfying anti-climax to your series: priceless.
Now, I love a good gripping serialised narrative as much as anyone. But what I really love, and have always loved, about podcasting as a medium is the potential to do just about anything and take people along with you. Sometimes I look enviously across to YouTube and what it has incubated: new genre forms, new visual language, remarkable creative innovations. Podcasting has provided a nurturing home for prestige narratives like Serial. It’s been a space for them to reach audiences and tell stories and literally change the world. But what will be the next thing to find its home in podcasting? And are we trying hard enough to find it?
That’s the note I’ll end on – not quite doom, maybe more of an ambient disquiet. Because, yes, there are things to be concerned about in podcasting in 2023. But look, we’re already a month into the year, and the sky hasn’t fallen in, right?
