The Future We Want

Last weekend, I attended what may or may not be the last Los Angeles Podcast Festival, better known as L.A. Podfest, one of the earliest if not THE earliest in what is now a worldwide glut of podcast festivals. So this'll be about podcasting, again, and before I get into the observations, I'll just ask you: Have you subscribed to MY podcast yet? You haven't? Please do! It's not about radio, it's about the strange things in the news you may have missed, and it's the shortest podcast you'll find anywhere. Yes, I use "it's less than two minutes!" and "it's over before you know it!" as selling points. Anyway, it's free and you can subscribe quite easily and, here, I'll make it as easy as I can:

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And right there's one of my observations: One of the biggest obstacles to podcasting breaking past niche status is that it's not quite easy enough to find, play, and subscribe to podcasts. Yes, there are plenty of apps that do it, but I think there's still a barrier for people who are not terribly tech-savvy. Maybe younger people used to installing apps and downloading and streaming find it easy, but the majority of users don't, and that's not just among the elderly. It's a hassle unless someone comes up with an elegant, easy, and, most importantly, native app to do everything. It's why Apple is dominant for podcasts even though it has a minority share of phone sales: It has a native app. It's not the best -- have you TRIED the one in iOS 11? Ugh -- but it's there when you buy the phone. Android, which has a vast majority of the worldwide market and a lead in the U.S., has no native app. You have to find an app and download and install it on your handset, and people generally don't bother with that unless they're REALLY motivated. In fairness, radio isn't on many handsets, either. And Google just bought (and shut down) one podcast app to add the app's development team to its staff, so maybe that'll mean all phones will feature a native podcast app soon.

Or not. And if not, that could be a major delay. So is the practical impossibility of finding new shows, which tends to come down to word of mouth and being featured on a chart in iTunes or having your show be fed to a more popular show's subscribers. Exactly how best to get the word out is still a work in progress. Some people say that being a guest on someone else's show helps, but I didn't see that effect when I was at a podcast network. (Nevertheless, I'll be a guest on anyone's podcast. Just ask.) And the rapid adoption of smart speakers like Amazon Echo will make playback easier in the house, although it's still awkward -- I know my podcast can be heard on those devices through iHeartRadio and TuneIn, somehow, but I can't yet figure out the command that will get Alexa to find it. When I do, you can rest assured I'll tell you, over and over and over and over. I might just walk down the street yelling it, just to get everyone's Echo or Dot to obey.

The other hurdle is monetization, and nobody's quite nailed that one, either. Brand advertising is the holy grail, but direct response is still king, and while some companies are trying to lure more brand advertising, I wonder if the difficulty in measuring a campaign's success means podcasters should instead be trying to generate more direct response clients, or convert brand advertisers into direct response clients. It's what podcasts do well and talk radio has ALWAYS done well: host-read spots with a call to action do work. They're worth more. That's a good thing for both talk radio and podcasting. And if that doesn't work, there's always Patreon. Seriously, a lot of shows are able to generate good money through voluntary monthly donations.

That's a much more important thing to know about podcasting. This festival had plenty of professionals in attendance, but the majority of the crowd was made up of fans. They paid good money to sit in hotel ballrooms watching people do, in effect, radio shows, only on tape. There were no exciting visuals, no bonus content, nothing but people sitting in chairs wielding microphones and talking, and the audience paid rapt attention. They loved it. They cherished the opportunity to meet and talk to their favorite podcast hosts. The enthusiasm was all over the building. None of the shows have audiences that are appreciably bigger than your average major or medium market radio talk show, but there's nothing casual about the attachment the audiences have for the shows. It's like nothing you've seen for radio, with the possible exception of Howard Stern in the '90s.

It's what you, if you're in radio, should be hoping to develop, and, I gotta tell you, you're not going to be able to generate that on broadcast radio alone. You need to be podcasting -- you need to be delivering your content to people who make the active decision to choose your show, who take that step of finding you and clicking the Subscribe button and listen to you on their own schedule, not when you want them to. We are now deeper into the on-demand world of information and entertainment, so even if you're on the radio and feeding your show at a set time like you always have, you need to offer it on demand, too, and offer content on demand that isn't the same as what you do on broadcast radio. That leads us to the best part, something I've told you here countless times before and which I'll say again: Despite the lag in monetization, despite the Android gap, despite the discovery problems and the glut of shows, podcasting and streaming make this the very best time to be a creative person making audio entertainment. You can do it cheaply or free, you can do it anywhere, you can do anything. No rules. The field, after a decade of the medium, is still wide open and practically begging for someone to create the Next Big Thing.

Why aren't YOU doing it? That's a challenge. And there's no excuse.

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All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics is a great (if I do say so myself) resource for things to talk about on the radio or on podcasts, and I put my (lack of) money where my mouth is because I use a handful of those very topics for MY podcast every day. If I can get some talk going with this stuff, imagine what someone like you with talent can do with it. Find it all by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. And there's the Podcasting section at AllAccess.com/podcasts.

And make sure you're subscribed to Today's Talk, the daily email newsletter with the top news stories in News, Talk, and Sports radio and podcasting, plus my PerryVision! video commentaries. You can check off the appropriate boxes in your All Access account profile's Format Preferences and Email Preferences sections if you're not already getting it.

At the risk of being redundant (as if I care), please listen to and subscribe to my podcast, "The Evening Bulletin with Perry Michael Simon," available every weekday. It's short! Find it at Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, and RadioPublic; here's the RSS feed and, if you just want to listen on the web, you can go here or here.

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook (where I also do some live videos about radio) at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

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The situation that prevented me from doing my videos for the last few weeks is finally resolving itself, so I'll be back to that next week, I hope. Maybe I'll tell you all about it on one of the video episodes. Or maybe I'll try to forget it, which might be the best option. I don't know that I want to relive that particular pain any time soon.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
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