Podcast renaissance or Renaissance podcast?

Yesterday I declared that Todd Glass coming out of the closet on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast is a podcasting milestone. Just after posting that piece I read writer and comedian Gaby Dunn’s article “Hustlin’: Inside the Podcast Renaissance” at Good magazine.

When I first saw the title, I thought to myself, “Renaissance?” Using that word implies that podcasting somehow had some earlier flowering that wilted and died. Dunn sort of implies that the dot-com boom was a fertile period for podcasting. However the word and the proliferation of the RSS innovation that spawned podcasting didn’t happen until 2004, a good 3 years or so after the boom turned to bust. While podcasting became a trendy media topic around ’04, I’m not sure it ever withered enough to need a rebirth.

Neverthless, that doesn’t undermine Dunn’s point that podcasting is growing in popularity while the accessibility of the production tools are encouraging artists, producers and commentators from many walks to take advantage of the medium’s power. Talking with comedian podcasters like Maron and political ‘casters like siblings Molly and John Knefel, Dunn compiles a good list of tips for would-be podcasters.

As a former podcaster myself (with podcast distribution lasting five years), I can heartily endorse these morsels of advice. In particular I would emphasize this one:

Make sure your podcast is sustainable. It’s hard to continue baking, writing, painting or doing comedy while also spending a ton of time making a podcast about the same topic.

“If it’s just a few [episodes] and then you give up, there’s not much of a point,” (podcaster Matt) Ruby says.

Elivs Mitchell (left) and Marc Maron (right)

Elvis Mitchell, that is, host of public radio KCRW’s half-hour interview program, the Treatment. This week’s edition of the program has comedian and podcast host Marc Maron as guest, and at the beginning Maron makes a point of the fact that Mitchell was willing to say the show’s abbreviation name (though clearly not what it stands for), while the New York Times declined to even mention his podcast’s innocuous three-letter name.

This is actually the best interview I’ve heard with Maron since he started his podcast. He and Mitchell develop an almost immediate chemistry, and Mitchell sounds like an actual fan. He is quickly able to dive in and discuss how Maron is able to get comedians like Norm MacDonald to let down their guard, drop their persona and go deep.

What’s notable about this appearance is that the Treatment more often features actors, authors, musicians and other personalities who are there to promote a project that has been validated by a studio, publisher or label. While Maron is a working comedian and former Air America radio host, his podcast is self-produced. Maron does make TV appearances on shows like Conan, but those primarily feature his stand-up bits. The Treatment interview, on the other hand, is really about Maron and his podcast, treating WTF as a media production just as legitimate as movie or television show from a studio or network.

Now, it is true that an edited version of WTF aired on some public radio stations this past summer. But Mitchell made no mention of it in their interview; there’s no indication that the brief public radio run was used as the bona fide to justify Maron’s appearance. Rather, it sounds like Mitchell is listener and fan, and actually wanted a chance to talk with Maron.

I see an interview like this as another sign of the growing prominence and legitimation of podcasting as an actual media form, rather than being simply dismissed as the audio equivalent of bad public access television. While there are certainly the audio equivalents of Wayne’s World in iTunes, there is an increasing number of thoughtfully produced programs that could belong on radio, if only radio were interested in more diverse and creative fare.

I’m sure most Radio Survivor readers have already heard about the passing of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. Jobs will be rightly celebrated for how his company’s products, directed by his unique vision, changed the way most of us make and consume media. This includes radio.

Whether intentionally or not, the introduction of the iPod and iTunes in 2001 almost instantly created a fearsome challenge for traditional terrestrial radio. As the first elegant and user-friendly portable digital music player, the iPod helped create a perfect storm for the commercial radio industry, especially the nation’s largest radio owner, Clear Channel.

It’s easy to forget that at the turn of the century Clear Channel was riding high with mammoth profits brought on by its program of aggressive consolidation whereby the company vacuumed up stations, fired staff, and consolidated operations and programming in order to drive down costs. By 2001 the public had started to become wise to the fact that their local stations no longer sounded the same, with more repetition and fewer recognizably local personalities. As listeners started to tune out, Jobs’ Apple stepped in with a desirable alternative, the iPod.

Sure, folks had mobile CD and cassette players for years before the iPod. And many models of MP3 players had been on the market since the late 90s. But for most people the iPod offered the first user-friendly device that could supply 1,000 songs in a pocket-sized package.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent podcasting, but the integration of podcast management with iTunes in 2005 made the new medium accessible to new listeners who might never have sought out a specialized “podcatcher” application. The iTunes store almost instantly became the default directory for finding audio programming from across the web, which otherwise required many Google searches to sniff out.

While the iPod and iTunes are not exclusively responsible for the declining fortunes of commercial radio–I’d argue the industry deserves most of the blame–the impact of these technologies cannot be denied. So today I remember Steve Jobs for how he changed the landscape of radio and audio programming for the better, by making it easier and fun to find and listen to programming from around the world, helping to foster a whole new medium that sounds a lot like radio.

#4 in our series on radio trends of the decade

Like so many innovative ideas, podcasting is quite simple. It’s not like there weren’t online radio programs prior to 2004. The A-Infos Radio Project has been providing free hosting for independent and grassroots radio programs since 1996. Live365 made live webcasting broadly available back in 1999. But what podcasting brought to the party was a way to make finding and downloading online programs easy and automatic.

Prior to 2005 if there was a online radio program you wanted to listen to you had to check its website on a regular basis to see if a new program was available. Or if it was a live program you had to make sure to tune in to the stream at the right time, just like conventional radio. If you didn’t check in with your program’s website, then you wouldn’t know if there was a new episode.

At its essence podcasting is just an extension to an earlier innovation known as RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. Developed in the late 1990s and finding popularity with the emergence of blogs in the early 2000s, RSS provides a site summary to a “feed reader” which allows you to know when blogs and other sites are updated, rather than having to check back.

Podcasting resulted from the simple addition of the “enclosure” tag which tells a feed reader or “podcatcher” to download an audio or video file. This little addition to the RSS specification meant that you could now use a piece of software to periodically check your favorite radio sites and download new programs as soon as they became available.

What really caused podcasting to take off was when Apple added podcatching functionality to its iTunes application. When that happened iPod users no longer needed to manage separate programs to find and download podcasts. Using iTunes they could do it all using the same application they used to sync and manage their iPods. But make no mistake, podcasting existed before Apple’s embrace. In fact many early adopters chafed against the obvious iPod reference inherent in the podcasting name. Nevertheless, the name stuck.

It’s fair to say that the emergence of podcasting revitalized online radio, and even audio programs in general. In the same way that TiVo and PVRs breathed new life into television, podcasting suddenly gave listeners the ability to mold their intake of audio programming to their own schedule. At the same time, RSS podcasts feeds made it much easier to index podcasts and create easily searchable online directories organized by genre and keyword. It’s that innovation which stimulated an onslaught of podcast production.

And thus did thousands of podcasts bloom. Of course, they varied in quality from the brilliant to the moronic to the mundane. But any radio lover cannot discount the importance of thousands of people suddenly embracing the production of audio programming at the same time the commercial broadcast radio industry was busy gutting itself. Producing your own podcast became so popular that within a couple of years a score of new USB microphones and podcast production kits became available to give the budding podcaster better tools than a $9 headset microphone.

Flashing forward to the end of the decade podcasting is now something we take for granted. It’s also largely been robbed of its counter-cultural “pirate” cred. Like blogs before it, podcasting has largely been co-opted by the mainstream media giants. Looking at the iTunes Music Store’s top 20 podcasts, the vast majority are produced by major broadcasters–including NPR–or other big media companies. Only two out of 20 might be considered independent by comparison: The Onion’s Radio News and Mondo Media’s Happy Tree Friends. This mainstream corporate dominance doesn’t mean that there aren’t still plenty of radically independent podcasts out there. There are also quite a few successful and not-so-radical podcast enterprises built outside the mainstream media. It’s just that when it comes to popularity they’re no match for the promotional power of Sony Pictures, or even National Public Radio.

Still, I contend that podcasting gave a shot in the arm to the art of audio programming, and therefore, also radio. Note that while public radio programs like This American Life are also some of the most popular podcasts, you don’t see any major commercial radio programs quite so high on the list. Good audio programming transcends medium, whether it’s on your radio or your iPod. Even if they couldn’t reach Car Talk-sized audiences, podcasting gave independent producers an opportunity to reach a bigger audience than before podcasting. That alone is a valuable, lasting legacy.