A homily on today’s audio industry
I was asked to open the HearSay Festival in a church, so I did some preaching.
Welcome to Dispatch #89 of The Audio Insurgent.
A few weeks before the recent HearSay Audio Arts Festival in Kilfinane, Ireland, I got a message from Diarmuid McIntrye, the festival’s director saying he wanted me to do “a once off talk - I’m thinking provocation but also reflection.” Diarmuid explained that the festival programming would follow an arc, from grief and loss (it would be an understatement to say the audio industry…and the world in general…has experienced quite a bit of both since the last HearSay in 2019) and then segue into optimism and hope over the following days. He asked me to speak at the opening event on the first night in Kilfinane’s “Old Church.” So I went to church, literally and figuratively, about where our industry is at and the moment we are in.
I thought it was worth sharing with you all as well.
[BRIEFLY: SEE YOU IN LONDON?] Even though I’ve been home from Ireland for about 16 hours, I’ll be heading back across the Atlantic next week to be at The Podcast Show in London. I’ll be lurking around on Wednesday and Thursday. If you are there, please say hello. I really enjoy when readers say “hi” when we are in the same place at the same time.
[A HOMILY ON THE STATE OF THE AUDIO INDUSTRY] Even though the cemetery may be located next to the church, it is a tradition in Irish funerals to walk around town for a bit, stopping by the departed’s work place or home or other places associated with them before ending up graveside.
Diarmuid told me he was concerned how present all the recent loss in the audio industry (jobs, projects, funding, etc) was to those planning to attend. He felt the best way to help people see beyond this was to borrow that funeral structure and name the loss, name the feeling, and then move forward. I was asked to give a talk in the Old Church in Kilfinane before that walk.
The following is what I shared with those attending:
When Diarmuid asked me to do this talk, he wanted me to share some thoughts about where our audio world finds itself at the beginning of this festival and my beliefs about where things are heading. About two weeks ago, Jesse Baker and I were recording a podcast episode when the host said that he no longer says “I think” or “I believe” because he realized that no one cares what he thinks or believes. Instead he says, “What my experience has shown me…” I think this is brilliant, so today I’m not going to share what I think or believe, but share what my experience has shown me.
When I was asked to do this, my first response was it needed to be here, in the Old Church.
How many of you are here in Kilfinane for the first time?
Well, this building is referred to as the “Old Church.” What’s referred to as the “New Church” is St Andrews, which you’ll probably walk past during the festival. What I find charming is that the New Church has been called the “New Church” since it was built…150 years ago. It was called “new” when Queen Victoria was on the throne and Rutherford B. Hayes was the U.S. President. This Old Church, oddly also once called St Andrews, actually isn’t all that much older than the New Church, but this church was Church of Ireland and the New Church is Catholic.
Regardless, I wanted to do this talk here because the residents of Kilfinane have been coming here for hundreds of years, to mark the best and worst moments of their lives.
Anyone who has ever traveled with me knows that I love to visit churches. I go into churches almost everywhere I go. I sit in them and take them in. You can really feel a sense of the people who have used that place as a marker for all the milestones of their lives. They marked births there, first communion and confirmation to mark the transition into adulthood, marriages, the baptism of their own children, and their deaths. With the cycle repeating over and over and over again.
A piece of scripture that often gets quoted in places like this at these moments is found in Ecclesiastes 3:1: “To everything there is a season.”
And when I think about the current state of the audio world…
my experience has shown me this:
We are in one of those cycles of seasons.
We’ll come back to that in a moment.
When people come to churches to mark their milestones they do it in a variety of ways. Sometimes with prayer, sometimes with ritual, and sometimes with song.
So I’m going to start this with a song too.
That’s Dinah Washington, with her 1953 song “TV Is The Thing This Year.” We’ll end the song there. The rest of the song goes deep into double entendre. Dinah calls the TV repair man to come fix her television, then declares she wants him to twist her dials…it kind of goes downhill from there.
But the line I care about is in the chorus, “Radio was great; now it’s out of date. TV is the thing this year.”
That was 73 years ago.
At the time, people thought the Bright Shiny Thing called TV would kill audio.
The talent left. The attention left. Who needed audio anymore?
Sound familiar?
Radio was left behind. And then something unexpected happened.
Stations had hours to fill… so they brought in kids to play R&B records.
And that—accidentally—became the birth of rock and roll.
So what looked like an ending… was actually the beginning of something new and arguably bigger.
When Diarmuid asked me to give this talk, he told me he was moved by the sense of loss and grief that attendees had voiced in advance of the festival. Since the last time we met in April of 2019, so much has changed. And that helps explain why this moment feels the way it does. Personally, we all lived through a really scary and uncertain time with COVID. Many of us have experienced loss. Real loss. Including our work. In my country we all got excited when we got rid of the bloated orange baby man. But then somehow the bloated orange baby man came back. We’ve had wars and economic upheaval. The world seems unsettled and fragile–and the audio industry definitely feels unsettled and fragile too.
I wrote a book once about ghosts.
While working on it, a question I put to a lot of people was “How come so many ghost experiences happen at night?”
I got back a surprisingly consistent answer: It’s because at night things are still, dark, and silent.
The ghosts are actually around us all the time–but we only notice them in those still, quiet moments.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I hear headphones, pumping noise into my head all day long. I’m trying to keep from what’s in the silence.
With that in mind, I’d like to pause for a moment of still and silence, to acknowledge the loss and grief we have brought with us.
[PAUSE]
Professionally we’ve seen a lot of loss. Back during the last HearSay in 2019, we were all on a podcast-fueled sugar high. Jobs were popping up daily, with good salaries and interesting work. Companies had recently spent over a billion dollars buying other companies in podcasting. It seemed that every week new and exciting things were happening in audio. These were our salad days. And back then, we were very clearly in one kind of season. Now, the audio world is in another.
I can’t do much about any loss you have experienced–outside of to say I’m sorry and it sucks and I’m mostly sorry that these things happened at a time of such turmoil in the world and in our industry. But I do hope that tonight I can help reframe your thinking about the moment our industry is in and what happens next in this cycle, and what you can do about it.
Personally, I don’t spend a lot of time lamenting the salad days of audio and podcasting. For two reasons, the first is that those glory days that we all mourn: money: flowing, jobs: abundant, projects getting green lit, everyone’s attention on podcasting. When this festival first started in 2015, Edison Research said 21% of U.S. adults listened to podcasts every month. By the time we last gathered here in 2019, it was over 30%—and it felt like it was only going one direction. Bigger. Every. Year.
And I should take a minute to apologize for being both very podcast centric and very American centric in my remarks. First off, the data is more abundant about US listening and has been available longer. Also, podcasting has been the focal part of the audio industry for almost two decades and its fortunes raise and lower all boats in the broader audio world.
So by 2019, things were lit. On fire. Everything felt like it was going up, up up.
But here is the problem, more of it than we want to admit wasn’t real.
We saw a mirage…and we were naive enough to believe it.
We saw people coming into podcasting excited about the medium—creating jobs, writing checks, greenlighting projects, and pumping up the industry. But it wasn’t real.
These people were not believers in the power of audio, they were believers in The Bright Shiny Thing. They weren’t chasing podcasting’s potential. They were trying to bask in the warmth of the current Bright Shiny Thing.
If you don’t believe me, here is something to consider.
In 2022–the peak of podcasting’s robustness–right before things started to get weird–The Hollywood Reporter ran a feature titled “The Top 40ish Most Powerful People in Podcasting.” It featured photos and short bios of the people really “moving the needle” in the exploding world of podcasting. There was talent in that list, along with platform execs, those running networks, and heads of podcasting for large media companies.
The list is actually bigger than 40–there are 62 people listed: 26 talent and 36 executives. The talent side has been remarkably stable over time, but of those 36 executives–the people running the industry–the most powerful people in podcasting–according to The Hollywood Reporter in 2022–how many of them do you think are still working in those roles in podcasting today?
That number is shockingly small. That number would be about 6.
84% of those who were considered the industry’s leaders and game changers–just four years ago–are now gone–completely out of the industry.
And that shouldn’t be surprising. Four years before that list was published, very close to the time of the last HearSay Festival, how many of those 36 executives were already working in podcasting?
About 1 in 4 of them. Everyone else on that list came into podcasting, made a bunch of noise, talked big–and then left.
They didn’t behave like people who believed in the long-term power of audio. And what they left behind was damage. To projects. To jobs. To momentum.
But maybe the harder truth is this—we wanted to believe them.
We saw their enthusiasm for our work and thought it was directed at us. In truth, it wasn’t.
In the first book of Kings, Chapter 22, King Ahab gathers four hundred prophets and asks whether he should go to battle at Gilead. The prophets all unanimously advise him to go, declaring that the Lord will grant him victory. But they were false prophets.
There were so many of them, all saying the same thing, that Ahab believed them without questioning the motives about why they encouraged him to go. In chapter 22:6, it tells of “hundreds of voices, all saying the same thing… all confidently wrong.”
Or perhaps a better passage would be Exodus 10:14-15, :The locusts covered the face of the whole land…until the land was darkened…and nothing green remained.”
Fun fact: do you know what those departed former-powerful podcasting people are doing now? Over half of them are now working in AI.
Most of these people went from 2022 Bright Shiny Thing to 2026’s Bright Shiny Thing.
And while we are on the subject, I’d love it if for the next three days we can agree not to say the letters “A” and “I” together, unless, of course, someone asks you to spell out “raisin” or “eclair” or something. Hey, it’s HearSay–it could happen.
I mentioned there was a second reason I don’t get too wrapped up over the podcasting and audio’s reset over the past several years.
Because if this moment isn’t random—if it’s part of a cycle—then the question isn’t what we lost. The question is: what is this moment trying to teach us?
Here is the thing about hardship and grief: it is painful, but it is often your best teacher. You learn to live with the moment. And eventually, you learn how to use it.
My experience has taught me this: endings are beginnings. And you are ready for the new beginning when you recognize what the ending was trying to teach you.
If your spiritual side believes that everything happens for a reason, then it is on you to figure out what this moment is trying to teach you.
Romans chapter 5:3-5–something probably read many times in this room over the centuries, says, “We rejoice in our troubles, knowing that trouble produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
So if that’s true… if hardship produces something—if this moment is actually shaping us— then the question becomes:
Who does this moment belong to?
Because here’s what my experience has shown me…
The Bright Shiny Thing people? They don’t stick around for this part.
They weren’t built for it. Plus, they’re already gone.
They go where things are easy. Where things are loud. Where things look like they’re only going up.
But this part—this quieter, harder, uncertain part—this is where the people who actually care about the work… stay.
This is when the people who believe in audio—not as a trend, but as a craft—do their best work.
And if trouble produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope–it is the work that is the hope.
The work of the person sitting next to you. Your work. Our work.
What will take us through this cycle and up into the next? Well, it’s you.
But it isn’t entirely you.
There is one group attached to the audio industry that didn’t get a memo about the audio industry recession or reset or reckoning or whatever you want to call it.
That’s the audience.
During all the tumult of the last several years that we’ve felt professionally, during that time the audience has only grown. Remember that number of Americans who listen to podcasting? It went from 2% to 21% to 30% in 2019. Today… over 40% listen every month. And nearly 70% of Americans have listened to a podcast. Ever.
While all of this turmoil was happening to us… they didn’t leave.
They grew. The problem wasn’t that no one was interested in listening. The problem wasn’t the audience at all. It was everything surrounding that audience.
And we’re starting to see this show up in some research. Listeners say they love podcasting, but then, many say something like, “But…what happened to all the good stuff?”
But you know what else my experience has told me…that you, in your hearts, already know all this.
When I first sat down to write this talk, the first line I wrote was this next one:
Why are we here?
Why did we come here when every piece and talk you will hear over the next few days could be shared on a Zoom call, a Substack, a Slack channel, or linked in an email?
Why did we come from all around the world here, to Kilfinane, a community of 700 people where there are five pubs yet they still haven’t figured out how to have consistent cell phone signal. Why have we come here?
Well, I have news for you.
Even though it is the reason we told everyone we wanted to be here, it isn’t because this is an audio festival. I think it is pretty safe to say we didn’t come for the audio.
We came to be a community.
We came to support each other. To inspire each other. We came to hear something we all love and care about–so much that many of us have devoted our working lives to it: craft and story, the power of the human voice…and the power of listening.
We came to do it together. Because that is the fuel we need to move forward.
Recently, Apple Podcasts made its announcement about supporting video podcasts, and for reasons not to explain right now–but happy to later–video in Apple Podcasts is only slightly less of a shit sandwich than what Spotify is doing. And I explained this to my creative partner Jesse Baker and told her how much of a bad deal this was for creators and how completely divorced these efforts are from any understanding of what actually makes podcasting work.
If Dinah Washington was alive, she might sing instead, “Audio was great, now it’s out of date. YouTube is the thing this year.”
Right?
Jesse looked at me and said, “I think we just have to accept that people don’t care about the things we care about: the grace of an edit, the pacing, the craft of sound.”
And I said, “I refuse to accept that!”
And when it came time to figure out how the two of us were going to find time to come to HearSay, we had to move a lot of mountains to make this possible. Our families are dealing with a lot this week so that the two of us could come to Kilfinane, because I felt it was so important for us to be here for the moment that’s about to happen right now.
I would like every single person in this room to say, “Jesse, we care about it too.”
[PAUSE FOR THEM TO DO IT.]
We are all united. Our collective experience has shown us…the power of listening. The power of playfulness in our work. The power of the unexpected moment. The power of connection. We come from many places–and many of us do very different work in audio. But we all share that understanding.
A passage spoken many times in this room over the centuries is Matthew chapter 18:20 “When two or three are gathered together, I will be in the midst of them.”
Well, here we are.
Turns out… ‘the thing this year’ is always going to be the thing this year.
And it always will be.
But what lasts… is this.
Now, before we wrap up, I want to share a prayer I have for all of you.
Over the next several days you are going to listen to a lot. You will hear some breath-taking work. You will hear from some sharp minds. You will be excited. You’ll be moved by what you hear. You may hear something in another language, but you will still feel it. And let’s be honest, you’ll hear some weird shit too. You don’t have to love everything, because you won’t. You won’t necessarily get everything either–and that’s okay. Great work isn’t for everyone.
You will also meet new friends. You will connect deeper with others. You will appreciate so much.
But this isn’t my prayer for you. My prayer for you is not that you find inspiration–because I know that’s going to happen. I want you to do a revolutionary act.
My prayer for you is that you will BE the inspiration.
And I’m not talking about HearSay being a place to brag or show off your work. I’m talking about being inspiration by encouraging each other.
My experience has shown me that I can learn something from anyone–and the way I show gratitude for that is to go up to them and tell them that I enjoyed their work or what they had to say. And you should do that as many times as possible this weekend.
My prayer is that you will spend the next few days being an unbridled enthusiast for the work of the others here. Let go of ego and let go of cool.
Well, we all work in audio, so we let go of being cool a long time ago.
But, anyways… don’t just say that you liked it, but tell them a sentence or two why. Strike up a conversation in the pub. Chances are one of you has solved a problem before that the other is experiencing–or have an idea that inspires one from them too. Trust me. It will mean the world to them.
And these connections are not just feel good. Ariana Martinez, who is here, has worked at our company on projects. We first met Ariana here at HearSay, when we saw them do a presentation of their work. One of the biggest shows I ever worked on was an NPR show called Invisibilia. The two original hosts of that show met when they were both standing on the sidewalk outside of the Third Coast Festival.
That’s the thing about hope and possibility—it doesn’t just magically show up out of nowhere.
It shows up in small moments.
In a sentence you say to someone. In the way you listen. In the way we show up for each other.
My experience has shown me…that when you have hope and possibility in your heart, your best work is always ahead of you. And the fuel for that hope and possibility isn’t a clever Pro Tools edit…it is each other.
Now, before we move on the next thing in our agenda tonight, I want to close the same way they closed a lot of moments in this building, I’m going to share the peace with you–and afterwards I want to hear that big old “Amen.”
So here we go: May the peace of the Lord of Audio be with you and remain with you, always.
Amen.
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric