The podcast at 20: How the medium upended storytelling, and what's next

25:00The podcast turns 20

It's been 20 years since the first podcast was shared with the world.

Today on Commotion, Vulture podcast critic Nicholas Quah and podcast producer Kattie Laur join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to explain how the medium has changed our culture — and what the future of podcasting sounds like.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, where the panel gives their current favourite podcast reccs and consider the future of podcasts and video, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: If we're talking about podcasts, Nick, how would you say they change our expectations of what storytelling is and the listening experience?

Nicholas: It's interesting because the podcast did start out as the audio extension of blogs, and so a lot of the sort of transformative effect is baked into that tradition, which is to say it democratized the means to publication. A lot of folks now can make, basically, radio on their own, and that opens up the field of possibility in theory. In practice, it's really hard — how do you find a one-in-a-million voice that you want to listen to?

But in terms of how it transformed storytelling on the one hand and radio production on the other: it allowed for longer form, more experimental types of creation. In traditional radio, you have to fit a certain kind of instant need to meet audiences and to get in front of a ton of listeners and be able to stick in a way that maybe generates enough profit for the corporation or, in this case, sort of balancing the budget for a public radio station. But with podcasts, you could experiment in a way that's kind of lower risk off the bat — unless of course, you're investing tons of money into it, which is the problem that we find ourselves in, in the contemporary world.

Elamin: As someone who has listened to a podcast called Every Single Album: Taylor Swift, and each episode is two hours long, and they just get into the minutia each episode, I go, "Yeah, you can experiment and you will find your loyal audiences."

Nicholas: Oh yeah, I would love that.

Elamin: Maybe not at scale, but you'll find me, and that's all I really care about. OK, that leads us to Serial, which was the very first podcast to top five million downloads. It won a Peabody Award the very next year. It's this critically-acclaimed thing that also proved there's a real market for this kind of content. Tell me what happened to the podcasting industry after Serial came out.

Nicholas: Serial came out in 2014; that was sort of right in between when podcasts were created and today. So it was 10 years in, and by that time podcasting had already gone through multiple sort of, like, "Could this be the next big thing?" — a kind of rise-and-fall cycle. By the time a lot of today's sort of well-known podcasters were already making stuff — Bill Simmons, Marc Maron. This American Life had been distributed as a podcast for many, many years up until that point. So Serial comes out and it proves a very, very simple experiment on the part of This American Life staff, which is: can you tell a very long-form story, serialized week after week? At the time, nobody was doing it because it was an untested idea.

The phenomenon that Serial produced accelerated what had already been happening — which is, we were pretty clear that there was a market for listeners and a market for advertisers. And suddenly, when it became such a global phenomenon, everybody wanted cash in. The money came in, in the four to five years right after that.

Elamin: We should give people a scale of the amount of money that came in. In 2015, there's about $100 million worth of advertising in podcasting. By the time you get to 2021, you're somewhere near $2 billion. That happens within a span of just five, six years — just this massive explosion. But we are also right now in this period of contraction, right? You have all these layoffs happening at Spotify, NPR podcasts; you also see a bunch of podcasts being canceled. NPR is pulling back a little bit. Why is that happening now?

Nicholas: Two parts to this answer. First is, what happened the past 10 years was essentially a huge influx of, on the one hand, actual genuine long-term investment, but also speculative investment on the part of large music streaming platforms — primarily Spotify, but then also competitors in iHeartRadio, Sirius XM and Amazon Music. Spotify led the charge, putting in close to a billion dollar investment over the subsequent 10 years, to put the bet down that they would take charge of this new media industry. The problem was that a couple of months ago, the larger economic picture turned turbulent — for a number of reasons, including rising interest rates, but also just structural cycles. And suddenly, everybody was held to task by investors to also show profits instead of just growth. So a lot of the business models that were still emergent or were still developing had to be sort of backbenched and, as a result, they doubled down on the core businesses that they needed to develop — and that did not include podcasting for a lot of these companies.

Elamin: I want to look at the future for a moment because yes, there's been all this turmoil in the industry, but you have genuinely incredible podcasts being made. One of our former colleagues right here at CBC, Connie Walker and her colleagues at Gimlet, won a Peabody and the Pulitzer for her deeply personal podcast about her dad's experience of surviving residential school. Kattie, when you think about Connie's story [and] the success of that podcast, what does that tell you about the success that we're capable of in this country?

Kattie: That's such a hard question for me to answer because there's just so many good stories here. I think it's kind of sad that Connie had to go to the States to tell that story, but it just tells me that there's so much great content here that … needs to get out there.

Elamin: A lot of Canadians end up leaving to work for American companies in order to make the podcasts that they want to make. Actually, a lot of Canadians end up working for American companies while not even leaving the country. What kind of changes do you want to see made to the way that we sort of take care of our podcasters?

Kattie: There are a number of changes that I want to see made. I started the newsletter [Pod the North] because I felt that the industry in Canada was just so fractured. There were network productions happening, there were freelancers kind of running around trying to meet everybody and get a break and make some money, and then there's a huge skew of indie podcasters out there that are just trying to have fun, make a little bit of money out of it. And when I came in, I was kind of like, "Nobody knows who each other is." I was emailing everyone across the board because I identify as an indie producer, a freelance producer and a network producer, and it was really hard for me to make connections still. So that's kind of what I'm noticing, is that everyone sort of seems fractured here.

Elamin: I think what you're getting at is this larger question of, do we take this seriously as an industry in this country? Because there are lots of media reporters — how closely do they cover podcasting in this country? And you maybe saw a gap in terms of the weight with which we treat podcasting in this country.

Kattie: There's definitely a lack of anyone talking about it here, other than if you're within the industry talking to your five people that you work with all the time. But I also think there's a culture within Canada that is just generally risk-averse and when you compare it to what Nick was talking about with what's going on in the States and how massive the podcasting industry there is, in Canada it's not like that at all. We seem to be in very small, tight-knit teams. We really have a couple of hubs — we have our hub in Toronto with lots of podcasters, a hub in Vancouver that's a little smaller, and then we've kind of got our hub of French language podcasts in Quebec, but that's kind of all that we've got going for us. Nobody knows each other. 

Elamin: Nobody knows each other, but also this larger question of nobody knows where the industry's headed, too, and in a smaller market like Canada, it can be a little bit difficult to scale your podcast in a way. Listen, it's hard to make any predictions. Things are changing so fast, but Nicholas, five years from now, what's the biggest shift going to be? Are we all going to be just watching our podcast on YouTube? Is that the plan?

Nicholas: I think in five years, everybody will be underwater. So I think all of this will be rendered irrelevant.

Elamin: Wow. Well, that's something.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show, where the panel gives their current favourite podcast reccs and the future of podcasts and video, on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.