A decade down the line and podcasts are hitting a peak, with increasingly innovative and attention grabbing content coming to the fore. There's considerable variety in the format but, says Crowd's strategic initiatives director Sarah Brierley, they rarely come better than when putting you in shoes you’ve never walked in before...
I’ve become a little bit obsessed with podcasts recently. My current favourites are: The Bottom Line, The Why Factor, TED talks, 99% Invisible, The Moth, Radiolab, Love + Radio, This American Life and, of course, the much-discussed Serial (host Sarah Koenig and producer Dana Chivvis pictured above).
I don’t think I’m alone – as ft.com says: ‘Serial’s success is the most visible example of a renaissance in podcasting – a format that has been around for a decade but which has received a recent surge of interest from consumers, investors and advertisers.’
Podcasts are free, on demand (perfect for bingeing on), portable and can be customised to your tastes one episode a time. And their quality is increasing to such a degree they are becoming something of an art form.
Of course, podcasts come in many different flavours – from fact to fiction, comedic banter to academic esotericism – but I’ve noticed there are clear themes around the ones I’m listening to: they educate me or they tell me a real-life story. In my digitised multi-tasking life, they feel a valuable, even valid way to spend my time (or indeed enrich another activity like cooking). Somehow more ‘justifiable’ than, say, listening to music, consuming podcasts means I’m not wasting a moment. And I wonder if this determination to make even downtime count is in part driving the popularity podcasts are currently enjoying.
A recent Guardian article puts this well, describing our: ‘…21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative podcast on urban beekeeping.’
So while it’s unsettling to think that we don’t know how to stop doing all the time, and should perhaps just go off grid now and again, I’ll be sticking with the humble podcast. There’s a seemingly endless supply of high-quality content that’s not bombarded by the repetition and sensationalism of so much other media. There’s something to suit any mood or moment; and quite often, for 30 minutes or an hour, they put you in shoes you’ve never walked in before.