Is Audio A Destination Or A Waypoint?
As podcasting experiences its own “pivot to video” era, it's time for a bit of existential thinking.
I decided to take an issue off to focus on, well, summer, mostly. Hope you don’t mind.
Today is mostly one big thing, but look below for listings for two new job openings at Magnificent Noise. Feel free to share (or apply yourself): one posting is for an Associate Producer on a new climate show, the other is a Senior Producer on a new show we are launching in business and self-development.
But first…
[TODAY’S FIRST THING: AUDIO AS A DESTINATION OR A WAYPOINT] As I’m writing this, there are three men in the Magnificent Noise office, busy running cables, adjusting lighting, and configuring equipment for our new three-camera 4k video studio. In just a few days, our tiny little audio production company will also be a tiny little video production company too, because apparently you can’t be a podcaster in 2024 unless you also have the ability to capture and produce video content as well as audio.
I have incredibly complicated and deep feelings on this, which is why I’m going to be touching on this topic a few times in the coming months. The Audio Insurgent is also a way for me to get my head around these topics, too.
As podcasting is experiencing its own “pivot to video” it seems that almost every conversation about podcasting these days includes conversation about video, too.
And for good reason–for many shows, you can connect to a lot of people, and connect with them more often, by offering a video version of your podcast episodes. However, note that I said “For many shows…,” as your results will vary. Just within the shows that Magnificent Noise produces, we see wildly different results when posting to YouTube. We have several shows that have tried posting to YouTube and only seen dozens or a few hundred “views” per episode. Yet we also have one show that just posts audio-only episodes to YouTube (accompanied by a static image of the show art and captions), but those uploads often generate as many views as all the listens on all audio platforms combined. For that show’s audience, YouTube is a great place to listen.
The best practices and what/why/how of this is a topic for another day, but today I want to focus on a more existential question: Has audio been the destination for a lot of podcasters, or is it just a stop along the way to video?
To me, audio has been so much the final destination that I’ve never even asked myself this question before. It feels whole and complete—nothing is missing.
I think that many people would answer that differently–and, frankly, that really concerns me.
Over the past 5-7 years, we’ve seen a massive insurgence of video refugees into podcasting. They came in promising to take their vast experience in movies and television and use it to help shepherd podcasting into a fully-formed media industry. Most of these people have since left, after it became apparent that success in podcasting would require actual work, beyond just cashing VC checks, writing their own ridiculously large checks, and making huge promises with no idea how to deliver on them.
Their time among us reminds me a lot of a fantastic book I recently read called The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. The book chronicles Captain Cook’s third and final voyage around the world, mostly looking for the elusive northern passage (to navigate above North America). While many previous histories of Cook’s voyages celebrated his “discoveries,” this book takes a pretty even handed look at how Cook and his crew sailed around the world, encountering other civilizations, and leaving them such gifts as smallpox and other illnesses, venereal disease, bad cuisine, weapons, imposed religion, and often laid waste to the native culture and population. Cook was eventually killed by a very angry group of Hawaiians over all this, which he kinda deserved.
When I think of podcasting’s TV and movie saviors, coming to “discover” podcasting and move it into “the real world” of media–I look at them, and what they left us with, kinda similarly to Cook’s weapons, VD, and smallpox. The colonialist video people, almost universally, created little to nothing of value, improved nothing, yet brought a lot of ill-fitting business and creative practices that have left podcasting much worse in their wake. Podcasting is less creative, less adventurous, more dependent on the wrong sources of revenue, and more filled with short-term thinking than it was before they came. But podcasting is already on the way to recovering and showing signs of moving forward into its own future.
But I digress–I could go on about that, but today I want to think about how those people looked at audio and how the industry they left behind looks at video.
More after this jump…
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There are many very good places to hear today’s news about the podcasting and spoken-word industry. Here, I’m trying to do something different–create a space to understand several layers deeper, why things happen, and what the implications will be. This is a place for thought and analysis…plus my take on what it means.
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Historically, audio has always been easier to transmit than video--on broadcast, storage mediums, and digitally. Radio existed for decades before TV came along. CDs existed for 13 years before DVDs debuted. Even in the rapid acceleration of the digital world, audio streaming that rivaled the quality of other media was years ahead of similar video streaming quality. The lag in video in each of these wasn’t because of a lack in consumer interest, but effective technology just hadn’t been figured out yet.
I mean it just makes sense, audio just contains a lot less information than video. Uncompressed full-fidelity audio runs about 10 mb per stereo minute. Uncompressed video takes up 70 times that amount of data. And as new video technology emerges (like 8k video), that disparity in file sizes will continue to grow. It’s a lot easier to figure out how to quickly move around 10mb than it is 700mb.
And every time a new video format has come out–it indirectly poses an existential threat to the preceding audio format. The mainstreaming of television caused massive disruption to radio. Not just talent, but whole programs, left radio to embrace the exciting new platform. Radio, left without its most creative minds in front of and behind the microphone, had to reinvent itself.
The same thing happened with storage mediums. After the false start of video discs, DVDs not only established a way to store and distribute high quality video--but pretty much killed off the CD player to boot. While CDs remained in cars, elsewhere, you put your old CDs into your new DVD player to play them.
But podcasting was seen as the disruptor--solving just two basic problems with radio: time and geography. With podcasting, listeners could listen on demand, not when the radio station offered the program. They also could listen to programs that would be too niche to share on a terrestrial radio station. Think of almost any podcast you produce or listen to--would there be enough people interested in any given market across the country to justify its place on a terrestrial radio station? For 99.99% of podcasts, the answer is “no.”
And podcasting not only was a disruptor for radio listening, it was a disruptor for radio talent--with many of radio’s best and brightest leaving to try their hand in podcasting.
And now we find ourselves at another disruptive change point–with audio podcasting moving from being the disruptor to, arguably, the disrupted. And it makes me question why creators and execs got into audio in the first place.
Because here is the interesting thing about audio–while it gets disrupted, it never gets fully destroyed. Radio was deeply disrupted by television, but that disruption caused it to rethink what radio could be–and ended up reinventing itself into what we think of as radio today. MTV disrupted the music industry, but it didn’t kill the radio star, it forced it to change.
There are some things that are better to consume on video, sure. But there are also things that are better to consume in audio as well. This isn’t a technical limitation–it just works better.
There is the old saying that when you appear on television, people will say “I saw you on TV!” But when you are on the radio, they remember what you said.
While we use the same part of our brain to process audio and video information, we process them differently. And for many of us, that is the point. We chose to make audio–not because we lack the skill, technology, or ability to create video, but we chose to express story and ideas aurally. Because, as a listener, we experience it differently, we feel it differently.
We “see” it differently.
We chose to make audio because we feel that listening is important. Hearing is important. And video, while it contains a lot of information, isn’t always the right choice as the best way to connect a story to a consumer.
I believe that every medium has its advantages. I think there are stories and ideas better told in text (like this). Stories and ideas better told in audio. Some stories and ideas are better told in video. I think there are ideas better told in games, in theater, as art.
When I look at podcasting today and its “pivot to video”--I can’t help but ask if anyone is taking the time to ask these questions of what they want to put into the world. And almost everyone I ask isn’t thinking about this.
First the draw was bigger advertising buys from bigger brands if you offered video. Then it was seeing some others have success connecting to audiences with “vidcasts.” Now literally every conversation we have about a new project involves a substantial conversation about what we can offer in video as part of the production.
I hope you don’t read this as me being down on video–I’m not. Let’s remember where we started here. Our company is investing a significant amount towards purchasing and installing equipment, turning over a big portion of our physical space, and retraining all our staff to be able to produce video. Video clearly has a space, but the specifics depend on the project, its intended audience, and how that audience wants to consume it.
Jesse and I came to the belief that we had to do this when we started to miss out on projects because we had nothing to offer on video. We now talk about Magnificent Noise as not a podcasting or digital audio company, but as an “audio-first” company. Times change.
But with this, as we do with most things, we take a very deliberative process: what does Magnificent Noise mean in video? What video serves our work, our creative talent, and our audiences? And, again like everything we do, there is a different answer for every project we work on.
So strap in–we’ll revisit this topic again...and again...
And yes, I’ll post some pictures and put together a walk-thru and explainer once we are finished with it.
[TODAY’S NEXT THING: WE ARE HIRING!] When we have new projects, we often staff them with our own employees and network, but every so often we throw out openings widely to meet new people and talent. There are two new Magnificent Noise projects we’re hiring for–feel free to share (and to apply yourself):
Senior Audio Producer: (Full time temporary, possible to extend to permanent. Benefits eligible.) “The Senior Producer will work with us on a new program straddling the business and self-development spaces. The Senior Producer will have a love for great audio storytelling and possess a hunger for doing projects that break new ground in the podcast landscape. You will have both the ability to understand the vision for and take a leadership role in the projects we produce as well as bring fresh thinking to guide their development and creation. You excel at pushing beyond what others think is possible.”
Audio Producer: (Full time temporary, possible renewal. Benefits eligible.) “The Producer is a critical role on a small team at Magnificent Noise developing and producing Season 1 of a new podcast about climate and energy.”
[TODAY’S LAST THING: BECOME THE GEORGE COSTANZA OF MARKETING] Really enjoyed reading this great Substack from Steve Pratt of The Creativity Business. Worth your time.
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric