After the podcast world’s year from hell, many are looking to the New Year for a fresh start. But given how the rest of the media business is barely making it out of January, such hopes feel shaky. Nevertheless, it is a new year, and the podcast ecosystem has to contend with very big questions about what it is and what it’s going to be. Below are a few of the major threads that frame how I’m thinking about the months ahead, from YouTube to artificial intelligence to whether or not we’ll see more alternatives to the Big Podcasting model that defined the past half-decade.
Have we hit bottom yet?
That’s pretty much the question that’s popped up in almost every conversation I’ve had with podcast folks since the start of January, which, of course, is completely to be expected. After wall-to-wall bad news last year, everybody’s looking for a fresh start. The annoying answer is that “it depends.†in some senses, there’s only so much lower the podcast world as a whole can go, and as a few people wrote me — mostly confidentially, though not always — after my piece collating survey sentiment responses went out, one could find examples of podcast companies and publishers that actually improved their positions over the past year if one poked around enough. (Talkhouse was the lone shop that agreed to go on the record about this.) When I approach this question, I think about it along two lines: Will there be more layoffs? And will it be as hard for most creators, shows, and publishers to do business this year compared to last? You can break that second question down even further, since there’s a difference in stability between ad-driven operations (which is to say, most of the biggies) and direct support-driven ones. On that note, I’ve started to hear optimistic things about the former already. The latter, meanwhile, had always been relatively steady.
As for layoffs, I don’t think we’re done seeing more of them. For one thing, Audacy just filed for bankruptcy, which portends some amount of restructuring. But in general, the layoff question is equally applicable to the broader media, tech, and entertainment business that often host significant podcasting arms. It has not been an auspicious start to the year; since we turned over the calendar, we’ve seen Sports Illustrated’s parent company laying off “a significant number, possibly all†of its employees, putting the very existence of storied but long-withered publication in doubt; Condé Nast announcing it was folding Pitchfork into GQ, triggering a wave of layoffs there that signals the likely end of that site as a music-review destination; and the Los Angeles Times drifting deeper into chaos. Elsewhere, staff cuts were made at Universal Music, Hallmark Media, Paramount Global, Amazon’s MGM Studios and Prime Video. More waves in the video-game industry, despite having a particularly strong 2023: Riot, Unity, Amazon’s Twitch, Discord. That’s just the big firms; the gaming site Kotaku has been keeping a running list, with the headline noting that almost 4,000 layoffs have hit the industry — and it’s not even February. Think tech is safe? Not so much: Amazon proper, TikTok, more Meta on the horizon, and Alphabet, parent company of Google and, well, YouTube, the big new podcast frontier.
So … YouTube?
Speaking of which, that’s the other thing everybody seems to want to talk about. “Should I be on YouTube?†“Am I leaving audiences and money on the table?†“Is it even appropriate for the stuff I’m making?â€
The context is a growing conversation that’s reframing podcasting’s historical identity as an open-distribution technology primarily associated with audio content. These days, the rise of YouTube seems to have ultimately claimed most video-creation activity, and it’s drawing more participation from podcast creators.
I’ll show my cards here: I’m still not entirely sure how to think about the whole YouTube thing in terms of podcasting. As you can probably tell, I continue to write about podcasting as an audio-first ecosystem, and to the extent I’ve processed the YouTube thread, I perceive it more as a trend where audio creators are diversifying into YouTube either as an extended distribution point or a complementary expansion. I feel compelled to point out that this is a reversal, or an evening out, of a trend that first emerged a few years ago when a steady stream of YouTube creators diversified into podcasting in search of a business arm that offers more stability and less algorithm capriciousness than YouTube. Anyway, I’ve been monitoring the rash of reports and survey studies that are working to add clarity around listener behavior and YouTube, but often, I’m left with a feeling I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at. Am I now old? Crusty? Washed? Unmoving in my mental models? Possibly.
Anyway, the challenge for podcast creators expanding into YouTube firmly lies in the fact that, well, they now have to play the YouTube game. Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm. Do the image-thumbnail thing: provocative face? Excited face? Surprised face? “DON’T DO THIS!†“WORST MOVIE EVER.†It’s a brave old-new world.
How will the industry reorganize itself?
I would’ve said that the emphasis going into this year is on sustainability, but that isn’t terribly precise. Rather, it feels like the aim is simply autonomy: Can teams create, succeed, and fail on their own terms rather than have their fates dictated purely by entities outside their control?
On that note, given all that happened last year, 2023 closed out with heavy skepticism around big ad-driven podcast publishers and growing enthusiasm around alternative models, in particular the worker co-op structure practiced by Maximum Fun and Defector Media. I’m fairly certain we’ll see at least a handful of teams follow through on that enthusiasm, and I’m eager to see what kinds of new shows and talent those ventures will support.
News of Pitchfork’s obsolescence instigated extensive discussion about the kinds of media operations that are possible these days. You can be very big, like the New York Times, or you can be sustainably/profitably small, like Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack, but you can’t really be in-between any more. This mirrors a lot of what we’ve seen in other media sectors, like film and video games, and this has led to further rumination about the death of the “middle†— and why that middle species of media is culturally important. “The middle can be more specific and strange and experimental than mass publications, and it can be more ambitious and reported and considered than the smaller players,â€Â wrote Ezra Klein in his own elegy for Pitchfork. “The middle is where a lot of great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.â€
Seems to me that co-op shops like MaxFun and Defector, which realizes the combined value of groups, are models of that middle.
Can AI sling hot takes?
Yeah, yeah, it’s the shiny new thing of the moment. But the shadow of artificial intelligence looms over all creative work and podcasting is no different. Just as squeezed media companies are trying to figure out ways to automate (and dehumanize), say, various aspects of journalism as a product, so too will similar processes kick in across the podcast space. We already know of one major example: Spotify, stumbling and scraping for an idea on which to hang its future, began piloting an effort last fall to use AI tools to “scale†podcasts out into different languages. Whether it’s actually pleasurable or effective to listen to, I don’t know yet. Yesterday, Digiday published a report on how other big podcast publishers are thinking about those tools as means to advance other aspects of their businesses, like production assistance, sales processes, and “commercial message creation,†which I assume means using AI-generated voices to read ads.
Let’s say the quiet part loud. A considerable portion of this AI talk is corporate bullshit; a touch of spin to get investors excited or something. Part of the challenge navigating this thread is discerning what’s actually material and what’s just performative mumbo jumbo. There’s Spotify leaning away from editorially curated playlists toward algorithm-driven listening, and there’s the noticeable stream of pitches hitting my inbox about this or that podcast “integrating†AI into the creative in some or another, like a true-crime show claiming to feature a fully AI co-host, whatever that means.
I’m still thinking about the interview I conducted with Who? Weekly’s Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger earlier this month about their AI stunt. Right now, it’s hard for me to think about the use of AI being anything greater than prop comedy within the context of podcasting. But technology moves quickly.
What shows, genres, formats, creative trends, and programming focuses will define the year?
This is the perennial question most pertinent to me. Some bits and bobs on this point:
➽ 2024 is going to be newsy as hell for a simple reason: elections. A ton of publishers, podcasters, and news orgs (to the extent we have any left) will program into the category, which I imagine will naturally drive a ton of old and new listening — unless, of course, the seemingly inevitable Biden-Trump redux will cause more people to zone out than tune in. But it’s not just the United States we’re talking about. More than 60 countries, encompassing more than half of the world’s population, will be voting in what will be the biggest election year in history. (Vox’s write-up on the matter features a chilling subhed: “Will democracy survive it?†Hoo boy.) I haven’t seen a ton of trustworthy global listening data, but this would be an interesting year to keep an eye on that metric.
➽ The challenged state of the narrative podcast, let alone the limited-run series, has been much-talked about here and elsewhere, and it remains a subject I’m keenly interested in.
➽ Related to the YouTube section above, I’m curious to see the extent to which established audio publishers will start designing shows for dual audio-video purposes — and how that’s going to shape the aesthetic for most of the stuff we get moving forward.
➽ Areas I’m hoping to dip more into this year: actual plays, Canadian stuff, even more esoteric niches. The other day an acquaintance turned me onto something called the Beer & Brewing podcast, and I’ve since been schooled on the nuances of chillers in beer production.