What’s Behind the Great Podcast Renaissance?

What was not mentioned in this article is how awful talk radio is these days. Especially morning-zoo radio [1] where they have the exact same 3 person radio show in every city: 1) the old school radio guy, 2) the young &quot;edgy&quot; dude who goes too far, and 3) the girl who never contributes anything, except to tell the guys they are being too &quot;crazy and wild&quot;.<p>The shows use something called &#x27;prep burger&#x27; which is prerecorded or prewritten comedy bits that multiple stations reuse, such as fake prank calls (real ones are illegal now). They buy access to a database of them and shameless reuse comedy bits with zero originality.<p>It&#x27;s like mainstream pop music, the corporations have focus-grouped all the creativity out of the shows and keep everything within the safe confines of control and management. And I won&#x27;t even get into their obsession for political correctness.<p>The days of Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony style talk shows are gone. Even XM Satelite radio talk shows have all been neutered.<p>This is why podcasts are new and interesting. The personailities are free to do and say whatever they want. They dont have management or producers telling them what audiences want to hear. So they create authentic and original content.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_zoo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Morning_zoo</a>

I&#x27;m personally experiencing a renaissance of podcast myself, although part of why I stopped listening to podcasts several years ago was because I had moved from CA to NY, sharply limiting the time I was sitting in a car for hours (in a subway, you can play Angry Birds).<p>The Serial podcast is fantastic...I&#x27;ve forgotten the workflow of how to subscribe to podcasts and have them show up in my iPod, so I just go to the homepage (<a href="http://serialpodcast.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;serialpodcast.org&#x2F;</a>) and listen to them individually. This American Life has an excellent iOS app that&#x27;s worth the $2.99 fee.<p>The power of the podcast, or of radio in general, is to me, just another example of the captive power of basic, non-interactive narrative forms, something that is too easily lost in the rush to cram doodads into web publishing...I&#x27;m not saying non-interactive narrative is always the most <i>ideal</i> way to communicate, but it certainly isn&#x27;t a weak or lesser way. I think the success of Kindles and of simple publishing sites like Medium also attest to the power of text. Given that narrative power, and the hugely reduced complexity in producing single-media content, it never hurts to go simple if you have a compelling idea or story.<p>edit: A commenter beat me to this, I was just about to post that the serialpodcast subreddit (<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;serialpodcast&#x2F;</a>) is the best place on the Internet to discuss Serial, with at least a few of the people involved&#x2F;related to the events going on to discuss things. It has a respectable size of 3,580 readers...which is not much compared to the biggest reddits, but the number of threads and comments is pretty amazing...and hell, r&#x2F;journalism is less than 7,000 users.<p>I also don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a coincidence that reddit, like HN, is a highly-successful discussion forum because of its commitment to a simplified medium (virtually all plaintext)

I&#x27;ve been into podcasts for about 6 or 8 years now and, as stupid as this sounds, it has really changed my life. Not in some huge way, but still, those are strong words. There are just so many mundane, crappy things you need to do throughout the day. Especially since I&#x27;ve now got two kids. I have no idea how many hours I spend a week preparing meals, cleaning the kitchen, picking up toys, vacuuming, etc. Radiolab, TAL, Serial, Startup, et all turn that time from boring drudgery into something I _enjoy_. The quality of some of the content is amazing. I feel like I&#x27;ve sat down to watch a documentary, but instead I just cleaned the whole house or went for a run.

Personally, I&#x27;ve gotten into podcasting when it became easy enough to do so. About ten years ago, you could download Podcasts with iTunes, then sync them as a playlist, then... too complicated.<p>A few years ago this changed. I now have an app on my phone that auto-downloads the newest episodes of my favourite podcasts in the background. Whenever I want to listen to a podcast, the app will have one available. Additionally, these apps allow me to speed up playback, read through show notes, and skip forward over ad reads or boring sections.<p>This is very convenient, and only began to exist in the last few years, hence the &quot;new&quot; popularity of podcasts in the last few years. I don&#x27;t think we need to invoke in-car internet access to explain podcast popularity.

One thing worries me that is not about podcasts themselves but about the podcast delivery ecosystem: a huge share of podcasters use Google&#x27;s FeedBurner to deliver the podcast RSS feed and get statistics on listeners and subscribers.<p>Unfortunately, after Google acquired FeedBurner, they basically left it in the state it was in when they bought it, except that they disabled FeedBurner&#x27;s API a couple of years ago. With Google&#x27;s history of closing down projects that aren&#x27;t part of their main focus (including other RSS-related projects like Google Reader), many are worried that Google will soon close down FeedBurner and leave thousands of podcasters in the dark.<p>That wouldn&#x27;t be a problem if there were an easy way to migrate from FeedBurner to another platform. Unfortunately, there is not. If FeedBurner closes down, you will have to change to another RSS url, which means losing all your subscribers. Also, there is no practical way of changing the URL to your podcast&#x27;s RSS in iTunes, the biggest podcast listening platform.[1]<p>It is possible to be in control of the RSS URL and still use FeedBurner by redirecting an URL on a domain you own to FeedBurner&#x27;s RSS feed, but I suspect relatively few people have done that, and doing it after the fact means, again, losing all your subscribers.<p>[1]: According to Apple, you can report the podcast and get them to change the URL. In my experience, they simply never respond to such requests.

The article only anecdotally makes the claim that there was a downturn in podcast quality and listenership. I doubt that this actually happened. Instead podcasting has slowly been bubbling away and has now really broken through to be a more mainstream activity since it is a lot easier. I certainly never stopped listening to podcasts. We used to have to sync podcasts manually over USB to our iPods. Now we can download or stream them on the go with our smartphones and send them to the cars sound system via Bluetooth. Technology has gotten incrementally better until we reached now, where podcasting has become really easy.

Off topic:<p>What a horrible and evil website! It hijacks the horizontal arrow keys to change articles. Please, web designers, stop hijacking my keys and doing other horrible stuff with JavaScript. The web is for documents, and documents shouldn&#x27;t change how my browser works.

I think another big factor in podcasts getting more popular these days is that the content and quality of podcasts are getting better. Today you don&#x27;t need equipment and staff only radio stations can afford to produce high quality good sounding content. A computer with an USB mic and Audacity together with a tool like Auphonic [1] are enough to get good sound. The internet makes it easier to research stuff and prepare content collaboratively without being in the same room.<p>Because we strongly believe that there is a bright future for podcasting a friend and I started Podigee [2]. Our aim is to make publishing a podcast easier and faster so beginners can get an easy start and more experienced podcasters can focus on producing high quality content without worrying about publishing software and infrastructure.<p>Additionally we support a movement that was started here in Germany called Podlove [3]. They provide open source software like a Wordpress plugin for publishing podcasts and a web player which is currently completely revised (and will be pretty awesome after that). Besides that they also try to establish new standards and promote old ones that are not widely used (like paged feeds). Currently we (I do most of the coding) are working on a new kind of subscribe button [4] which will make subscribing a podcast a lot easier for listeners. We have a lot of podcast client developers on board to support subscribing through the button and we have high hopes that this will push podcasting even further. The button will see an official release in the coming weeks.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.auphonic.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.auphonic.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.podigee.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.podigee.com</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.podlove.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.podlove.org</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.podlove.org/podlove-subscribe-button/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.podlove.org&#x2F;podlove-subscribe-button&#x2F;</a>

It seems strange to me they would go on so long about podcasts and really only talk about public radio-ish podcasts. I&#x27;ve been listening to podcasts since the time when it was best described as an on-demand public radio feed. Public Radio has been riding the peaks and troughs of podcasting, but I wouldn&#x27;t say they are leading any renaissance, real or imagined.<p>If there is a renaissance, it&#x27;s being created by comedy podcasts. Let&#x27;s mention:<p>Jordan Jesse Go!<p>WTF with Marc Maron<p>Comedy Bang Bang<p>You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes<p>The Nerdist<p>Doug Loves Movies<p>Harmontown<p>And I&#x27;m not a huge fan but you have to mention Adam Carolla and Kevin Smith here too.<p>These are the people who made podcasting more than just convenient radio.

I think it’s just the Hype Cycle and we are now well on our way, up the Slope of Enlightenment: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hype_cycle</a><p>Podcasts are growing up. Access to them is easier than ever before. With mobile phones it’s nearly as easy to listen to podcasts you like as it is to turn on the radio – with the added benefit of being able to better pick and chose and, consequently, get a higher average quality (in respect to your own preferences). Plus, if you don’t happen to drive but are on the go you probably don’t have a radio with you, so podcasts (next to music) are just obvious to listen to.<p>All that infrastructure that makes access real easy wasn’t there throughout most of the 2000s. It was a kludgy process and you had to be quite active to make it work. (Manual syncing!)<p>So it’s easier to get podcasts and it’s also quite obvious that spoken audio content is attractive in many situation and with our devices we can make that content actually accessible to us in those situations – so of course podcasts are alive and well. We just expected too much too fast from them.<p>I still expect a bumpy road ahead, but just like blogs podcasts are here to stay and that’s that. Maybe they will even turn invisible after a while, you know, just another thing to do online (kind of like blogs did?), as normal as can be.

I smell Blumberg. I know he&#x27;s mentioned <i>in</i> this piece, but I suspect he was also <i>behind</i> it. Guy knows the game.

Between an hour long daily commute, the gym, and a life toiling away in a lab, I consume 4-6 hours worth of podcasts a day. I haven&#x27;t seen anyone in this thread mention Stitcher Radio. Stitcher is by far the easiest way to consume podcasts, and is easily my most-used app.<p>As mentioned earlier, I think the increased prevalence of 4G&#x2F;LTE wireless speeds have led to this renaissance. Also, it is now much easier to produce and distribute a podcast. The fact that advertisers are willing to shell out $5k for a 30 second ad spot certainly helps encourage the production of quality podcasts. Podcasts also provide an avenue for content delivery to those who are terrible writers, but incredible speakers.<p>For the HN crowd, I suggest checking out the Startup Podcast by Alex Blumberg of Planet Money fame (<a href="http://hearstartup.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hearstartup.com</a>). It&#x27;s a brutally honest, often painful portrayal of a completely inexperienced guy ditching his comfortable life in order to start a podcasting company. Listening to him pitch Chris Sacca will cause you to scream out &quot;WTF!&quot; in sheer frustration. But good for Alex -- he&#x27;s taking a risk that most only dream about.

I&#x27;ve recently gotten into podcasts, using Stitcher as my app of choice (which is ok, but not great -- any suggestions for Android alternatives?)<p>Other have already nailed the main points driving adoption: simplified workflow and the desire to fill dead time (driving is mentioned in the article; for me it is cleaning the house.)<p>I don&#x27;t think enough is made of the fantastic marketing channel that podcasting is. If you put out a high quality podcast you can get into the ear of your target market every week, and they are even going to seek you out. It&#x27;s really hard to match this with another channel, IMHO. Blog posts are of course super competitive. There is just a deluge of content and playing the sharing game is hard work, and visitors bounce. Email newsletters perform well but there is no doubt that processing email is a chore for most. Video requires too much active engagement, and is too expensive to produce. Podcasts aren&#x27;t so popular yet that the market is crowded, listeners hang around for a long time, and they seek out podcasts for fill time in their day, rather than your content having to compete with other tasks that demand more active attention.

I too love listening to podcasts every day. But I think this article has completely missed the mark on its main point. Most of the podcasts I listen to don&#x27;t have ads (or just have a 5-10 second &quot;sponsored by&quot; spot), which is why I prefer them by far to commercial radio. On those that do have ads I fast-forward through them.<p>Edited to add: I often donate to support the podcasts I listen to in the hopes of keeping them ad-free.

I wish &quot;podcasts&quot; weren&#x27;t a thing.<p>What I mean is, a podcast is nothing but a regular file served from a web page. That&#x27;s it.<p>And yet, by maintaining this false category, the end user is funneled through all manner of ridiculous and frustrating extra steps and wasted time just to ... wait for it ... download a regular file.<p>Every major media creator that has made their audio content available as a &quot;podcast&quot; makes it near impossible to simply grab the file. This has created a huge amount of confusion among non-tech folks who think some kind of special thing is happening when they click whatever weirdo pseudo-streaming &quot;let&#x27;s cycle through 8 different 250-character URLs before we feed the data to your browser raw&quot; button ... &quot;what app should I use to listen to this podcast ?&quot; &quot;how do I get this podcast onto my iDevice&quot;, etc.<p>I should be able to fetch&#x2F;wget any podcast without doing major surgery on a webpage, downloading an intermediate XML file and then wading through it until I see a link.

I totally missed podcasts when they were first a thing. But I&#x27;ve rediscovered them as part of my love of all things retrocomputing. There&#x27;s some really fabulous ones out there, more than I can ever possibly listen to, but they keep me reasonably entertained while I&#x27;m washing dishes or doing house work or commuting.<p>It helps that the app I use kind of makes the entire thing pretty painless.<p>What worries me though is that several of the podcasts I subscribe to, but haven&#x27;t gotten around to listening to yet are dead and thus the feeds are dead, <i>and</i> some of the feeds only show the most recent n podcasts, so I&#x27;m missing out on lots of the earlier shows.<p>Podcasts and old radio shows now keep me entertained when I can&#x27;t watch. I think of them basically like on-demand tv. There&#x27;s more available than I could possibly ever listen to.<p>For the topic area I&#x27;m interested in, it honestly doesn&#x27;t matter at all if the show is old.

Allow me to take this opportunity to mention that Roman Mars, of 99% Invisible (<a href="http://99percentinvisible.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;</a>) fame, is holding another kickstarter to fund the collective of Radiotopia -- the idea that podcast producers can make a living wage to produce great content.<p>This kickstarter, like many of them, has a funding match going on where if they get more than 20,000 backers at any level, one of their corporate sponsors will chip in $25,000.<p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1748303376/radiotopia-a-storytelling-revolution" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;1748303376&#x2F;radiotopia-a...</a><p>Even if you don&#x27;t contribute, I think you&#x27;ll enjoy 99% Invisible.

It&#x27;s too bad the article didn&#x27;t mention the explosion of history podcasts, thanks largely to Lars Brownworth (12 Byzantine Rulers) and then Mike Ducan (The History of Rome).<p>Since then there have been several dozen podcasts to get started, with a pretty diverse range of topics. Most of the ones I have checked out start out with &quot;I was inspired to start this series after listening to Lars Brownworth&#x2F;Mike Ducan....&quot;<p><a href="http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehistoryofrome.typepad.com&#x2F;the_history_of_rome&#x2F;</a> (He is dire need of webdev)

Anecdotally, it&#x27;s a lot easier now with 3g&#x2F;wifi&#x2F;4g than it was for the average person even a few years ago.<p>Also, you could argue that radio has become even less interesting as a medium in the last decade. Last, a lot of niche celebrities are doing podcasts now, so when you combine those things together, it seems like the makings of an interesting inflection point.

If it can help to promote Rss and Atom feed I&#x27;m all up for it. We don&#x27;t give enough credits to these technologies.

Some more contributors:<p>In addition to the higher potential revenues from ads, from the standpoint of the listener, the DVR-like ability to easily skip ads has been built in from the beginning. Similarly, most podcasts have the ads entirely at the beginning or end, making them even easier to ignore (I doubt it will stay this way, though).<p>I also like the fact that I can download many, many podcasts ahead of time and have a huge library to choose from depending on my mood. The storage costs on modern hardware is negligible.<p>Lowering costs of high quality audio and editing equipment and software has to be a huge factor.<p>And let&#x27;s not forget that a great many (close to all?) podcasts are free!

Stitcher app is my #1 used app. Highly recommended for podcasts. Also, a fantastic podcast not mentioned in this article is &quot;Hardcore History&quot; by Dan Carlin.

I just got an iPhone and the built in Podcast app is pretty good. I have subscribed to a couple of the most popular podcasts and have been quite impressed by the quality these days. Last time I listened to podcasts was probably around 2007 or 2008 and the quality was poor and that put me off. Only a few people such as Adam Curry had decent equipment. Now it seems most people can afford decent kit and do a reasonable job at editing.

I&#x27;ve listened to podcasts since before the term existed. In fact I seem to remember &quot;Gillmor Gang&quot; episode in which they are discussing that there is a new term going around for this thing they&#x27;ve been doing for a while.<p>Same with IT Conversations, it started as MP3s in directories and then rode it all the way to a dedicated company (Conversations Network) and SpokenWord.org super aggregator. All gone now.

Do not forget to thank Dave Winer and Adam Curry for their pioneering efforts in giving birth to podcasting.

I really love listening to podcasts at the moment, one of my favourites is the NPR TED Radio Hour.<p>I&#x27;ve recently built a simple RoR app to display the iTunes Podcast Charts.. <a href="http://www.podcastchart.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.podcastchart.com</a>

I&#x27;ve just recently started listening to more podcasts. I&#x27;ve listened to &quot;Skeptic&#x27;s Guide to the Universe&quot; for years, but I think my favorite podcast currently is Dan Carlin&#x27;s &quot;Hardcore History.&quot;

For someone who likes old radio dramas (<i>Suspense</i>, <i>Quiet Please</i>, <i>Night Beat</i>), are there any good podcasts for modern audio drama? <i>Serial</i> sounds interesting, and is something I hadn&#x27;t heard about before.

I&#x27;m not sure what it is either. But I did just start really consuming podcasts this year, so I am a member of the consumption side of this Renaissance, even if I have no insight to the systemic patterns that caused it.

Any podcast recommendations for the HN crowd? I personally listen to Hello Internet (CGP Grey and Brady Haran) and Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project (Adam Savage and friends).

What is behind the podcast renaissance is on demand downloading via smartphones, and cars having smartphone interfaces via Bluetooth or USB built in.

How come nobody mentioned Umano? While driving (or doing something else), you can listen to stories you&#x27;d otherwise read.

For me, it&#x27;s because all of my vehicles now have either an aux port or Bluetooth audio support.