Much has been written recently about podcasting as The Next Big Thing. Every time I open the newspaper or a magazine there's something about "get yourself out there" along with recommendations for software and microphones. Radio stations (well, the mega-conglomerates that own the radio stations) are saying that the internet and podcasting are killing traditional radio. Steve Jobs, who not long ago referred to podcasting as "Wayne's World," added podcasts to the latest version of Apple's iTunes software. Oh my God, the whole world is going to communicate through recordings played on pocket devices connected with white headphones!! Where's my charger? Where's my internet connection?! Why do they block this port at my office?!?!
Alright, let's look at this with a cooler head, shall we?
A podcast is a recording that someone makes on their computer, and the listener downloads it to his/her portable music device to be enjoyed later. In many cases, the person doing the podcast produces them on a daily or weekly basis, so as a listener you can "subscribe" to them.
This is exactly what I did when I was a kid, when I recorded my own "radio shows" with a Panasonic tape recorder and played it back later-- the only difference was that I had no internet on which to stick the tape, so those hours of my reading the headlines out of the Daily Herald simply languished in a drawer.
(To be fair, some of my "shows" were pretty cool. One of my favorites was catching all the different slogans on the First National Bank of Mt. Prospect's time-and-temp phone line-- "Don't bank it in your sock, sock it in the bank!")
What the breathless thousands aren't talking about are the other aspects of podcasts, many of which need to be addressed (or at least kept in mind) before we can take it seriously.
1. Content: Let's make an analogy. In the early days of movies, you had technology people trying to create art. Thomas Edison made a bunch of films which, when viewed today, are interesting only from an historical standpoint. It took a few years and people like Méliès and Griffith who saw the camera as a tool (rather than an end in itself) in order for movies to be taken seriously.
Frankly, I've found only a couple podcast series worth listening to more than once. I've heard a bunch which are just people goofing around with the technology ("Hey, does this new mike sound good?"), while others are people talking about what their cat did today. The exceptions are programs that are produced for radio like Harry Shearer's Le Show, or a podcast with a distinct mission like Leo LaPorte and Patrick Norton's This Week in Tech (but to be fair, there's a fair amount of geeky hardware tweaking going on in that show, too). The point is that it's going to take time for podcast content to get up to the broadcast quality we've come to expect.
2. Music Licensing: This is the one area where podcasts ask for trouble. The recording industry hasn't even fully agreed on how to deliver music legally through sources like iTunes and Napster; how are they going to get high school freshman Kyle Smith to pay ASCAP twenty cents for playing AC/DC's "Back in Black" on his "H3vvy Meta11 p0dKaZt" this week? Until this can be ironed out, radio has little to worry about, unless the entire podcast listening audience suddenly decides it wants to listen to unsigned bands or public domain songs.
3. Immediacy: Podcasts are recordings, which is fine if you're listening to something that's not time-sensitive. If the listener relies on podcasts for timely information, he runs the risk of downloading old information and missing out on what's actually news. Radio still has the edge here. There's also the nice (although less common and growing even less common) idea that the person on the other end of the radio is communicating with you right now.
4. Advertising: No matter how much fun it may be to create and distribute a podcast, there are costs involved, and someone has to foot the bill. Unless the entire podcast community suddenly develops an altruistic streak, someone will have to pay for podcasts in order to make them viable. Listeners may have to buy subscriptions (unlikely unless the content is really in demand) or sponsorship will have to be built into the podcasts themselves. The former idea will require podcast content of serious quality: I can't see people paying to subscibe to "The Dawn and Drew Show," no matter how cute it is. The latter idea is a sticky one, because the listener will be able to skip past any sort of traditional commercial announcement. We may have to go back to the days of Jack Benny or Fibber McGee and Molly where commercials were built right into the script, thus tightly linking the program and its sponsor.
All that said, there are some shows which I think would be great on podcasts. I would subscribe to a number of NPR shows (Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Car Talk, etc.) on podcasts. I would also like to hear a really good old-time radio program, similar to Chuck Schaden's Those Were The Days. These shows would make the jump perfectly.
Consider this a call for the true artists of the podcast form to emerge. In the meantime, we have the words of Moe Howard to keep it all in perspective.
