The calm voice of podcasts risks being lost in a crowd of noise | Financial Times
The night air above Manhattan was “filled with wireless messages” in 1909, Modern Electrics magazine wrote about the early radio boom, when anyone who bought wireless equipment could broadcast. In 1912, the US government grew tired of the chaos and limited amateur radio to a range of 200 yards.
Wireless mania is back, revived by the internet. If asked a few years ago to imagine a medium that would flourish in the age of digital communications, few would have predicted podcasts. But voice — not just the spoken word, but individual personality and tone — is filling the ether.
Two recent deals say more about the future of media than the sale of Time magazine this week to Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, for $190m. The biggest US radio chain, iHeartMedia, has acquired the podcasting group Stuff Media for $55m, and Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker magazine writer, is forming a podcasting company with Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of Slate Group.
Voice is not just the province of upstarts. Audible, Amazon’s audiobook subsidiary, is signing writers including Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker, to put voice first in creating new narratives. Audio is the fastest increasing revenue stream in publishing, and a fresh cause of tension between Amazon and book publishers over who controls rights.
The question is how much of this will last, and how much will be swallowed up like the early days of radio and of blogging. Some of the new wave of podcasting feels as much for the gratification of author and podcaster as listener. It is fun to be declaiming highbrow essays in a small studio, away from the click-chasing trap into which much of the media — including Time — have fallen.
Like blogging or blockchain, podcasting holds out the vague hope of returning to a peer-to-peer nirvana rather than mass media and blanket control by technology platforms. History shows that such episodes last for a while before the usual intermediaries move in with contracts for a few, while the long tail grows ever longer and more frustrating for the others.
You already need a strong hook, or personal fame as an author or speaker, to cut through the babble. It is too easy to get lost amid the thousands of quirky, amiably hesitant, yet confidently educated hosts speaking in what the author Teddy Wayne dubbed “NPR Voice”, after US public radio, the closest equivalent to the UK’s BBC radio.
Consolidation is approaching, as the recent deals indicate. Most traditional media brands, including the FT, host podcasts (one attraction is that they are cheap compared with video). Endeavor, the Hollywood agency, last week started an audio division, led by Dick Wolf, the television producer, with the promise to “take podcasts mainstream”, which sounds menacing.
Recommended
Hollywood agents may be crass, but they are not fools. Looming in the background are voice-activated assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, which can play music, radio and podcasts on command. The ease with which intelligent speakers can summon audio entertainment on phones, in cars and in living rooms promises to open up a new market.
That market is needed, not only by authors and studios, but by big technology groups. Voice search is a liberating technology but threatens Google, which gains most of its revenues from web search. It is more disturbing to insert ads in voice answers to search queries than on web pages. Other sources of revenue will be needed and listeners are used to ads on audio shows.
Podcasting’s audience remains narrow — 57 per cent of US podcast listeners have a bachelor’s or graduate degree, and 77 per cent are millennials or from Generation X. They also tend to be fans, listening to an average of seven per week, according to one study. That leaves plenty of room for growth among the 56 per cent of Americans who have not listened to a single one.
Narrowness is one of the appeals of podcasts. They often cover specialist topics and listening to them or to audio books on earphones is an intimate experience compared with watching films or television, or navigating the anger of social networks. Often, there is only one voice talking in the listener’s head in a calm, unhurried tone.
Whisper it quietly, but this defies one of the founding tenets of the internet — that the voice of authority was dead and audiences would in future interact on equal terms and in real time with authors. Podcasting is a one-to-many medium in which the listener lacks the means to answer back.
Podcasts need not be elitist; there is no reason why more people should not enjoy them. But as investment rises, the stakes become higher, and as the audience has to be widened to obtain a return, the incentive to talk more loudly and court controversy increases.
It would be easy to lose something rare in the transition, like the development of radio left behind the innocence of early pioneers broadcasting to a few fans over the airwaves. Many companies are eager to shape the future of the new medium, but they should not sacrifice its tone of voice.