I have been following Doc Searls’ account of the podcasting conference at Columbia University this past weekend. It is fascinating stuff – I wish that Columbia would have made these presentations available online – maybe they will at some point. My takeaway is that there is a lot of diversity in podcasts (subjects/formats), that there is no controlling silo (although many bigger podcasters seem to worship at the Temple of iTunes…), that there are a lot of podcast gems out there but it can be hard to find them (discoverability), and that like Sturgeon’s Law says, there are a lot of low-quality (my euphemism) podcasts out there, but hopefully through experimentation, better podcasts will arise.
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This week, a Substack newsletter was posted about problems that podcasts from former podcast studio Gimlet Media were experiencing (getting cancelled). In 2019, Spotify purchased Gimlet Media for $230 million dollars (more here on other Spotify podcast acquisitions). Why did people think being acquired by a big company was going to allow them to keep their artistic freedom and continue to do things the way they had done them? Demonstration of control of the channel (a la CBS/NBC/ABC of the 60s/70s/80s – you had to convince them to approve your show to get on the air) – maybe go back to producing podcasts yourself? After all, you must have a lot of money after that acquisition. Chapter 57 of this story discusses the Joe Rogan move to Spotify, and I wrote in 2019 about how to avoid the corporate takeover of podcasting. As Joel Grey and Liza Minelli sang in the musical “Cabaret“, money makes the world go around. If people want to produce podcasts to make money, there are ways to innovate, but the best place to start is to make great podcasts.
Thanks, Andy.
I believe a video of the conference will be published soon by the Tow Center (http://towcenter.org/). Much of it was slide-free, including the opening session with Chris Lydon and Dave Winer. (Hmm, maybe they should turn the audio into a series of podcasts.)