A few points he forgot to mention about audio, without answering it's hard to make a convincing argument:<p>1. There isn't a lack of sound currently. there are tons of podcasts , and even more video shows that can be consumed as sound(lectures, talk shows) . And there's a lot of music. Lack of content is not a problem or a reason for growth of future audio consumption.<p>2. People already consume alot of sound. Mostly in the form of music , because of it's emotional content. There's no reason to suspect they'll consume more music.<p>3. It's easier to communicate in writing, because you can easily edit it. Communicating with sound is more difficult(if you want to offer interesting content).<p>4. People prefer high bandwidth communication mediums over low bandwidth communication mediums. People prefer communication mediums you can control their speed and skip over content easily.<p>Why ? Both of this issues help with flow and engagement.<p>5. lack of good podcast monetization scheme. since good audio is much harder to produce than text , that's important.<p>EDIT: most of the work on making spoken audio interesting has been done on the content side. Relatively little has been done on the technology side. I wonder if there are some opportunities there.
There seems to be a common problem emerging amongst internet entrepreneurial types -- I know its only a small part of the argument but its something that really irks me since I saw the guy from Khush do a lecture where he did something similar.
They equate the generation of content (in minutes, in songs) as being somehow equal without really considering artistic aspects of creation or consumption. Great, some app can produce 30 million songs. They are derived from templates & I'd be surprised if the creators themselves even listen to them in their entirety.<p>I realize these guys are business dudes who have a tech fetish & have mainly left their artistic streak behind, but it would be really cool if proponents of excessively expanding media had more ideas for how to achieve some quality standard for creativity rather than creating tons of novelty apps. (Props to Soundcloud I guess for being on the BETTER end of that spectrum.)
Irony: "Sound will be bigger than video...If you can find the time to _watch_ it, do that and then let's discuss his arguments" (emphasis mine)<p>Why do we have to have video of everything from programming tutorials to "guy walking around a stage talking"?
If you recall, Odeo was Soundcloud v1.0, and it failed. Well, it produced Twitter, but from a market perspective that entity failed. The story is that the folks at Odeo were not "podcast people" (and thus didn't really eat their own dogfood) and furthermore, this was exacerbated when Apple added the podcast directory to iTunes, and they called it quits (in a very gentlemanly way). I'm not trying to say that Odeo and Soundcloud are exactly the same by any means, but it does point out a valuable lesson that there is value of revisiting/repositioning/resegmenting an existing market, and how it can lead to momentum, and ultimately success. (This notion is touched on in the 4 Steps to the Epiphany, and is not my original idea). Note that I was/am a user of both odeo and soundcloud, although i really like where SC is going.