Like any burgeoning art form, podcasts have a complicated relationship with corporate America.
The form’s appeal has long been its accessibility; for years, it’s been open to anyone with an idea, a little free time and a computer. The results haven’t always been stellar, but the medium’s potential is seemingly limitless.
The exact beginnings of podcasting are difficult to pinpoint — that, naturally, has been the nature of plenty of IP lawsuits, as those involved early on lay claim to the rapidly expanding industry. For the sake of brevity, let’s call 2004 the birth of podcasting, as that’s when the term was coined, at the pre-iPhone apex of iPod popularity. Conveniently, that arbitrarily chosen date puts pegs the medium at about 15 years old.
It also affords us the opportunity to borrow a tongue-in-cheek title from “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” a documentary that arrived roughly 15 years after the broadly acknowledged birth of a once-subversive music genre which found then-Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore sneering about “modern punk — as seen in Elle magazine.” While it’s true corporate America has long toyed with and circled podcasting, it seems likely that 2019 will be regarded as the year that podcasting had its “modern punk” moment, per Mr. Moore.
In other words, podcasting is an overnight success 15+ years in the making.
The numbers certainly bear it out. Spotify’s spending is probably the most commonly-cited flashpoint — and understandably so. While the music streaming service hasn’t given exact numbers, it announced plans to spend between $400 million and $500 million on the genre in hopes of catching up with Apple’s decade-and-a-half long head start.
In terms of landscape fragmentation, it does still very much feel like the wild west; like Netflix’s push into original content, it’s clear that there’s a lot of money to be made — but podcasters are perhaps a little less clear how to make it. Per a study released this summer by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC, podcast advertising is expected to reach $678.7 million this year. That’s up from $479.1 million in 2018, itself an increase from $313.9 million in 2017.
Spotify’s purchase of Gimlet Media — and its subsequent brisk hiring — point to a company looking to bank its success on exclusive content, again echoing the Netflix model before it. It’s clearly an important part of a strategy to differentiate itself as Apple Music slowly encroaches on the service’s marketshare.
But Apple isn’t Spotify’s main competitor. There are an estimated 750,000 podcasts out there, offering around 30 million episodes. That’s a lot of mostly free content. So far, listener payment has traditionally come by way of sitting through Blue Apron and Hello Fresh ad reads, a small price to pay.
For many, however, 2014’s Serial marked a major turning point, as long-time public radio darling This American Life branched out into a well-produced, highly addictive true crime series. For some, it introduced new heights for what podcasting could do, and for more still, it introduced the idea of podcasting, period.
According to Edison Research, 51 percent of the U.S. population has listened to a podcast. That’s up from 22 percent a decade before. Thirty-two percent of the population are monthly listeners, up from 11 percent in 2009. All of that amounts to extremely rapid growth, with lots of room to grow further, as manufacturers of cars and smart speakers further explore ways to listen outside of the more traditional smartphone and earbud models.
There’s also plenty of potential for misfires. Back in April, Luminary, a startup funded to the tune of around $100 million, botched its landing as podcast creators found their content being hosted behind the service’s paywall. The company issued an apology and went back to the shed for “retooling.”
There’s a lot of money to be made, but it’s bad policy to make it with other people’s content. Lesson learned. For now.
There will be more uncomfortable moments in the coming years, as money-making machines attempt to embrace a decentralized and democratized platform. But as of 2019, it’s clear that there’s no going back.
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