The Podcasting Revolution
Podcasting’s Recent Transition From Niche To Mainstream
B. N. Dent
HISTORICALLY, I FEEL THAT THE REALM OF PODCASTING was more or less characteristic of individuals conversing in order to deeply explore topic areas, with the hopes of uncovering new information or offering insight to eager listeners. And if these traditional podcasts were not as intellectually based, at least they would have a central area of focus. However, over the recent past, with everyone and their dog (sometimes literally) deciding to start a podcast, I believe that the space has become somewhat polluted. The traditional form of having a defined subject matter has transgressed into random groupings of people sitting down around some microphones, pressing the record button, and seeing what happens.
It would be silly to attribute the recent surge in podcasters to a collective revelation of profound insights that demand sharing. So, what accounts for the remarkable upswing in the popularity of podcasting?
Well, before uncovering this, I feel that some contextual information surrounding the world of podcasting would help in gauging and understanding the answer to this question. Many would have thought that the first podcast would have taken place sometime in the 20th century as it is a reasonably simple form of media, not requiring video. However, as a result of podcasts not being live, the only way to listen to them before platforms such as YouTube and Spotify was to actually download the audio files and then listen to them. So, due to technological limitations of storage capacity, during the 20th century, these files would have simply been too large for people to download onto their devices. The first ever podcast came in August of the year 2000. This came from an NFL franchise, the New England Patriots, who made recordings of their weekly live shows available to their fans on Patriots.com. Then, in 2003, Dead End Days was launched, which is regarded as the first ever video podcast, and is the main form that podcasts are viewed in today.
Relative to other forms of media over the 21st century, podcasts saw steady growth up until 2020, when they really started to pop off. What happened in 2020, you may be wondering. Surely you remember. They said that it would go down in history. They said younger generations would ask us how we endured through such a difficult time. What I am referring to is, of course, the pandemic and the lockdowns that it induced. During lockdown, everyone was very bored. And when we get bored, we look for things to do to fill the time. For many content creators, they decided to fill the void by trying out podcasting. I guess for them, the void was not only boredom, but also looking for something to replace their regular content which was no longer permissible due to isolation restrictions. For many of these content creators, trying out podcasting was somewhat of a shot in the dark due to the fact that its longer form skewed so much from their regular content, which revolved around capturing the interest of audiences whose attention spans had reached unprecedented lows.
Ultimately, delving into the recent history of podcasting, particularly its significant growth during the lockdown, helps illuminate the rationale behind the remarkable ascent of this medium, but it does not provide an explanation in its entirety. The predominant reason behind its growth comes from its malleability into short form content – the centrepiece of media today. Five second snippets from hour long recordings can be uploaded onto Instagram or TikTok, where they have the potential to gain virality instantaneously and effortlessly attract a plethora of fans to a new influencer. It is also for this reason that there has been a perceived descent in quality – when people are just making a podcast with the hopes that a small clip of gold will be produced, the overall quality drops severely.
Luckily, with the market of podcasting becoming utterly saturated by these talentless individuals who feel they have something unique to bring to the table, it is likely that this trend will soon die.