Sounds Familiar

You may have noticed that last week's column was a little short. This week's will be short, too, because I've been busy with various issues involving my relocation to South Florida (motto: "Whatever You Do, Don't Make Eye Contact"). I keep having to bail on work to rush off on one errand (looking at houses for sale) or another (picking up pretzels at Wawa).

That's why I was driving the other day, somewhere between Miami and West Palm Beach on Florida's Turnpike, and I was doing what I always do while driving, bouncing from station to station on the car radio, looking for something interesting. That's when I happened upon a brokered talk station on an FM translator, and I left it on for a few minutes, listening to a paid-programming talk show, wondering why I felt like I'd heard that show before. And I had, but not exactly THAT show. No, it was the show's style, the amateur vibe, the ragged live-read ads for local businesses, the unpolished nature of it all....

Podcast. That's what it sounded like. A million podcasts have exactly the same sound as the kind of talk show you'll hear on a brokered AM station on the high end of the dial.

The comparison, by the way, has nothing to do with the content of the shows. Podcasts have a wide range of content that goes from excellent to who-thought-this-was-a-good-idea?, but so do brokered talk shows. It's more about this: Before podcasting, if you wanted to do a talk show and couldn't get hired by a station to do it, you might pay for a half-hour or hour of time on some AM station, produce it yourself, sell sponsorships to local businesses and do live reads for them, and, well, that's it, unless you were also selling products or services or erectile dysfunction pills, in which case you were engaging in direct response or per inquiry commerce. Today, you don't need radio as a middleman. You can produce a show, sell sponsorships and do live reads for them, and instantly distribute the result on an international basis. Same show, different technology.

And different image: Tell people you host a paid program on AM radio on the weekends and they'll slowly back away from you, lest they catch anything. Tell them you have a podcast and they'll... okay, they may still back away from you, because everybody on Earth has at least dabbled in podcasting. But it's still perceived as cooler, a more legitimate thing than "The following is a paid program. This station is not responsible for its content."

The disclaimer: We're not talking about all podcasts. Many don't sound like brokered AM talk shows; they sound like repurposed public radio shows, or 1940s radio drama. (Another disclaimer for those who don't know my background with both radio and podcasting: That's a joke. Also partially true.) But at that moment, what I was listening to on that brokered talk station sounded as much like podcasts as it did like the paid programming I'd heard since I was a kid. What's old is new again, there is no new thing under the sun, the more things change, you pick the aphorism.

It's also a reminder that technology may change, but it's the content that counts. You CAN do podcasts, and radio, that don't sound like Sunday afternoons on AM. The challenge only begins when you decide to do a show or podcast; the real challenge is to make it different.

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You want to make your content different? Some help may be procured at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page, which shall provide you with unusual ideas for things about which to talk. Find it by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well.

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Apologies in advance, by the way, for any gaps at Talk Topics in the next few weeks; while I'm trying to maintain the usual volume, doing that and dealing with the move has been time-consuming and exhausting. I'm making a valiant effort to keep things as normal as they can be, but, well, I'm in Florida, where "normal" is not on the agenda. I'll also be taking Tuesday of next week off, but we can all make it through that crisis together. Well, YOU can make it through together. I'll be someplace else.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon